Envisioning Dante, c. 1472-c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page

'Envisioning Dante, c. 1472-c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page' (ENVDANTE) offers the first in-depth study of the material features of the early printed page for almost the entire corpus of prints (1472-1629) of Dante's 'Comedy', using cutting-edge machine learning computational technologies and image matching in addition to book-historical, literary and art-historical approaches. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains to this day one of Italy's most iconic and influential vernacular poets and is indeed a global author whose work has been translated into over 80 languages. His masterpiece, the 'Comedy', narrating the poet's journey through the realms of the afterlife - the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise - was one of the first vernacular books to be printed in Italy (1472) and the next 150 years saw over 50 print editions, a frequency which made it one of the most influential books in Europe.

The project brings together a multidisciplinary team from the University of Manchester (the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures and John Rylands Research Institute and Library [JRRIL]), and the University of Oxford (the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Visual Geometry Group in Engineering) to work on a uniquely rich and almost complete corpus of early printed books. The JRRIL holds one of the most complete collections of Renaissance Dante prints in the world, containing all but three editions printed in the period.

ENVDANTE uses this unique corpus of Dante prints in order to explore the possibilities of digital technologies to provide new perspectives on the mechanics and dynamics of premodern book design, print production, transmission, and reception. These tools will be brought together with qualitative approaches to reconceptualize the printed page and its constituent parts, as a physical and digital object, tracing its graphic evolution through time, territories, and media. The project will map and explore the fullest possible range of Dante editions, from the smallest pocket-sized ones to large study books with multiple commentaries and cycles of illustrations. ENVDANTE will conduct its analyses across a broad chronology, and then interrogate that production as a whole to address questions of page design, the use of images, the role of paratexts, the place of readers' annotations, and the social worlds of print and their networks.

The project aims to define the contours of an interdisciplinary field of study that will appeal to historians of different subjects (literature, language, art, print and scribal culture) as well as to digital humanists and computer scientists. It re-evaluates the entire early print corpus of this globally influential poet, and makes a major methodological intervention on the practices and principles of early modern book design in the broadest sense. It is envisaged that the project's pioneering use of technologies and multidisciplinary approach will offer new models and methods for future studies of the book, its history, its uses and relationship with digital media.

In addition to academic dissemination through conferences and scholarly publications, the project will produce the Manchester Digital Dante Library, a freely available online digital library of some 99 editions of Dante printed between 1472 and 1629 (the first such library of its kind globally), with online surrogate editions accompanied by metadata and additional contextual information. Other outputs include a digital exhibition and online data visualizations, as well as the facility for scholars, librarians and other interested parties to test and use our computational tools. Enhanced catalogue entries (surfaced to a worldwide audience), and a series of engagement workshops with curators and librarians, graphic designers and print practitioners, along with local photography communities and local history groups, will ensure the broadest possible reach for the project.