This project 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.
