Online Dante Resources

 

Mark Scarbrough

Walking with Dante [Podcast]

A slow walk through the entire Comedy, where each episode is a close reading of a short passage. It’s full of insights I haven’t encountered anywhere else. I’ve also had many thought-provoking conversations with Scarbrough on social media.

 

Columbia University

Digital Dante [Website]

A repository for multimedia Dante scholarship, including the full text of the Comedy (in Italian or translation) with Teodolinda Barolini’s commentary, readings, lectures, historical resources, and Andrew Frisardi’s superb translation of the Vita Nuova.

 

Dartmouth University

Dartmouth Dante Project [Website]

A searchable online database with over seventy commentaries in Italian, Latin, and English, from Jacopo Alighieri (Dante’s son) to the twenty-first century. These can be viewed side-by-side with the Comedy (in Italian or in translation).

 

Princeton University

Princeton Dante Project [Website]

A multimedia database of material related to Dante, including all of his works (in Italian or English translation), searchable commentary, written lectures, images, audio, maps and diagrams.

 

University of Virginia

World of Dante [Website]

A multimedia resource for Dante study, including the text of the Comedy (in Italian or in translation) with an interactive glossary on the sidebar, a gallery of famous illustrations, music recordings, and high-resolution maps and diagrams.

 

U. Napoli, Federico II

Illuminated Dante Project [Website]

A searchable database of early manuscript illustrations of the Comedy (miniatures, historiated initials, drawings, diagrams, and so forth) complete with descriptions.

 

Bowdoin College

Dante Today [Website]

A curated, crowdsourced repository of “sightings” and “citings” of Dante in popular culture (in music, films, the news… even restaurants). Edited by Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College) and Elizabeth Coggeshall (Florida State University).

 

Società Dantesca Italiana

Dante Online [Website]

Full texts of all of Dante’s works in original languages or in English translation.

 

Treccani

Enciclopedia Dantesca [Website]

A massive encyclopedia of everything Dante, all available for free online. It’s only in Italian, but you can almost glean the sense of it with Google Translate.

 

James Sale

The English Cantos [Website]

The poet James Sale’s project to promote Dante and his own poem, The English Cantos, a modern epic in the vein of the Comedy. The site also features poetry, readings, articles, art, and music related to Dante, from various contributors (including myself).

 

The Visual Agency

DivineComedy.Digital [Website]

An enormous repository of art inspired by the Comedy, searchable by the textual location represented in the artwork (e.g. go to Limbo to see art based on Limbo).

 

Wikipedia

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia [Website]

Wikipedia is often a good place to start looking for information, but you’ll find that the Wiki pages (in English) for women in the Comedy are particularly well done, thanks to a recent project by Laura Ingallinella and her students at Wellesley College.

 

Works by Dante

 

Dante Alighieri

Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia)

The great epic of the soul’s journey to God, which follows Dante’s journey through the three realms of the medieval Christian afterlife: Inferno (Hell), Purgatory, and Paradise. Then again, if you’re reading this, does the Comedy really need an introduction?

 

Dante Alighieri

New Life (Vita Vuova)

A little book of poetry, prose commentary and autobiographical narrative, which tells of Dante’s love for Beatrice and her untimely death. It prefigures the Comedy in much the same way that Tolkien’s The Hobbit prefigures The Lord of the Rings.

 

Dante Alighieri

Banquet (Convivio)

An unfinished philosophical treatise planned in fifteen volumes, four of which were written. Other than the first, which serves as an introduction, each book begins with one of Dante’s canzoni and draws philosophical ideas from the poem.

 

Dante Alighieri

Eloquence in the Vernacular (De Vulgari Eloquentia)

An unfinished treatise (written in Latin) on writing in the Italian vernacular, and perhaps the earliest linguistic exploration of Italian dialects. Dante planned four volumes for the treatise, but it abruptly ends in the middle of the second book.

 

Dante Alighieri

Monarchy (De Monarchia)

A political treatise on church and empire, in which Dante argues that all the world’s kingdoms should be united under a universal monarch (or emperor), and that the pope’s authority should be limited to spiritual matters (not secular).

 

Dante Alighieri

Rhymes (Rime)

Assorted lyric poems collected by modern editors, including the Rime Petrose (Stony Rhymes), four love poems to a woman called Donna Petra (“Lady Stone”).

 

Dante Alighieri

Eclogues

A pair of pastoral poems in Latin hexameters, written to Giovanni del Virgilio, who had urged Dante to write in Latin like the poets of antiquity. True to form, Dante responded by defending his use of vernacular Italian—in Virgilian verse.

 

Dante Alighieri

Letters (Epistole)

A collection of thirteen letters written to various rulers, peoples, Church officials, and a fellow poet (Cino da Pistoia). In a letter to his host Cangrande della Scala, Dante discusses how the Comedy is intended to be both literal and allegorical.

 

Dante Alighieri

Water and Land (Quaestio de Aqua et Terra)

A philosophical inquiry into whether any part of the ocean is higher than land.

 

Attributed to Dante

The Flower (Il Fiore)

A reworking of the Old French courtly love poem Le Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose) into a crown of Italian sonnets, sometimes attributed to Dante.

 

Attributed to Dante

A Word on Love (Detto d’Amore)

A courtly love poem in rhyming couplets, sometimes attributed to Dante.