More than sixty years ago, in 1965, on the occasion of the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, the great Dante scholar Gianfranco Contini spoke of his dismay in the face of the vast bibliography of books and articles about Dante. In the intervening years the situation has become unimaginably more challenging. Since the turn of the century, there has been a tsunami of publications leading up to and celebrating the 2021 centenary of the poet’s death. It is not possible to read everything.
What I offer here is a highly selective bibliography, mostly in English, designed to enable readers to explore aspects of the Commedia touched on in this book. The list includes some classic studies, and many stimulating recent publications. It is divided into sections (with some overlapping): the historical background; the life of the poet; translations of his works into English; the Commedia itself; and episodes and figures within it. It concludes with a list of electronic resources, many of them state-of-the-art in terms both of information technology and Dante research.
John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), gives a magisterial account of Florence in Dante’s time in its opening chapters.
Daniel Waley, The Italian City Republics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), is a comprehensive overview of medieval Italian communes, with a helpful account of the Guelphs and Ghibellines.
Daniel Waley, The Papal State in the Thirteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1961).
William M. Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy: The Conflict of Empire and City-State, 1310–1313 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960).
Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), offers a useful overview on medieval political thought. Nicolai Rubinstein, “The Beginnings of Political Thought in Florence,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5, no. 1 (1942): 198–227, is a more narrowly focused study.
David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London: Pimlico, 1988).
Richard Goy, Florence: The City and its Architecture (London: Phaidon, 2002), is excellent on the buildings and city architecture of medieval Florence.
Dante Alighieri, Le Opere, vol. 7, tomo 3, Codice diplomatico dantesco, ed. Teresa De Robertis, Giuliano Milani, Laura Regnicoli and Stefano Zamponi (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 2016), prints all the surviving documentary evidence about Dante’s life. It updates the Codice diplomatico dantesco, ed. R. Piattoli (Florence: Gonnelli, 1940), an earlier volume with the same aim.
Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. Philip Wicksteed (London: Oneworld Classics, 2009). This small volume also contains Leonardo Bruni’s Life of Dante as an appendix, and short excerpts concerning Dante from Giovanni Villani’s Chronicle.
Marco Santagata, Dante: The Story of His Life, trans. Richard Dixon (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). An ambitious account that sees the Commedia as an “instant book,” with the poet responding to changing personal and political circumstances as he writes.
Alessandro Barbero, Dante, trans. Allan Cameron (London: Profile Books, 2021). Written by a journalist, this lively book is less concerned with Dante as a poet than with his political career and fortunes and the historical background to them.
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling, with an introduction and notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 [Inferno]; 2003 [Purgatorio]; 2011 [Paradiso]). This is a prose translation that follows the original text line by line, and is supported by ample but not overwhelmingly detailed scholarly notes. Supplementary short essays on some issues are a valuable additional feature for readers keen to pursue certain questions.
The Inferno, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2002); Purgatorio, trans. Hollander and Hollander (New York: Anchor Books 2004); Paradiso, trans. Hollander and Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2006). This is a slightly more poetic version of the Commedia (Jean Hollander was a poet), still closely linked to the facing Italian text, but taking occasional liberties in the name of a more natural or poetic-sounding English. Each canto is prefaced by a detailed summary of its content (very helpful for those new to the poem). The extensive notes are lively and informal, while reflecting a profound scholarly knowledge of the text.
Purgatorio, trans. D. M. Black (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021). A fine new translation with a thoughtful essay on “Dante as a Psychological Thinker.” The author is a poet and psychoanalyst.
After Dante: Poets in Purgatory, ed. Nick Havely with Bernard O’Donoghue (Todmorden, England: Arc Publications, 2021).
Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). It is difficult to imagine this translation and commentary being superseded in English.
The Fiore and the Detto d’Amore. A Late 13th-Century Translation of the Roman de la Rose Attributable to Dante, trans. and with an introduction and notes by Santa Casciani and Christopher Kleinhenz (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000).
The New Life (La Vita Nuova) of Dante Alighieri, trans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1905). The old-fashioned language of this translation seems oddly suited to what the translator terms the “exquisite and intimate beauties” of this strange little book. A more up-to-date and very readable version is Dante’s Vita nuova, trans. and with an essay by Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), which usefully includes the texts of the poems in Italian and English.
The Banquet, trans. and with an introduction and notes by Christopher Ryan (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1989); Convivio: A Dual-Language Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Andrew Frisardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Easily the best version in English of this difficult text.
Monarchia, ed. and trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The English text only (Monarchy) is available in paperback in the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The Letters of Dante, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920).
Four Political Letters, trans. and with a commentary by Claire E. Honess (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2007), offers a version of the political letters in less antiquated English.
Translations of all Dante’s works into English are available online at the Princeton Dante Project and the Società Dantesca Italiana. The Columbia Digital Dante project has the Commedia, with ample commentary. (Web addresses listed below under “Electronic Resources.”)
Dante Alighieri, Commedia, trans. and with commentary by Natalino Sapegno (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1957). An epoch-making edition; the ample commentary, which insisted on the imaginative and conceptual unity of the poem, is still invaluable.
Dante Alighieri, Commedia, con il commento di Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999 [Inferno]; 2000 [Purgatorio]; 2001 [Paradiso]). This edition includes a translation or paraphrase in modern Italian at the foot of each page. The editor’s sympathetic understanding of the scriptural, liturgical and theological dimensions of the poem is unrivalled, as is her knowledge of Dante’s language, both Italian and Latin.
Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. Giorgio Inglese, 3 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 2021). This new edizione nazionale of the poem, prepared under the auspices of the Società Dantesca Italiana, consolidates and tweaks the text of the Petrocchi edition which has been the authoritative text since 1966.
Two richly illustrated exhibition catalogues published for the 2021 centenary contain essays on Dante’s life and works based on manuscripts and documents:
“An Ancient and Honourable Citizen of Florence”: The Bargello and Dante, ed. Luca Azzetta, Sonia Chiodo and Teresa De Robertis (Florence: Mandragora, 2021).
Dante e il suo tempo nelle biblioteche fiorentine, ed. Gabriella Albanese, Sandro Bertelli, Sonia Gentili, Giorgio Inglese and Paolo Pontari, 2 vols. (Florence: Mandragora, 2021).
B. McGinn, “Angel Pope and Papal Antichrist,” Church History 47 (1978): 155–73, puts the episode of Celestine’s abdication in a broader context.
Erich Auerbach,Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. Task (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), contains a classic account of Farinata and Cavalcante in Inferno 10.
Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Adam Beresford (Milton Keynes, UK: Penguin, 2020).
Cicero, De Officiis, with an English translation by Walter Miller (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1951).
Anthony K. Cassell, Dante’s Fearful Art of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), explores the connection between the figurative arts and the punishments in Dante’s hell.
Charles T. Davis, Dante’s Italy and Other Essays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), is a collection of essays on many aspects of Dante’s world, including “Education in Dante’s Florence,” “Dante’s Vision of History,” and “Brunetto Latini and Dante.” The scholars who have called into question Brunetto’s homosexuality are: André Pézard, Dante sous la pluie de feu (Enfer, chant XV) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1950); Richard Kay, Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978); Peter Armour, “Dante’s Brunetto: The Paternal Paterine?” Italian Studies 38 (1983): 1–38. John M. Najemy, “Brunetto Latini’s ‘Politica,’ ” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 33–51, examines Brunetto’s political thought in relation to the turbulent Florentine background.
T. S. R. Boase, Boniface the Eighth, 1294–1303 (London: Constable, 1933), is an exhaustive biography of the pope Dante loathed, including a full account of the charges brought against him in his posthumous trial, and the testimony against him (chapter 14, “Trial without Verdict,” 353–79).
Kenelm Foster, “The Canto of the Damned Popes, Inferno XIX,” in The Two Dantes, and Other Studies (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977), expertly places Dante’s condemnation of Boniface against the wider background of papal intrigues and misconduct in the thirteenth century.
Patrick Boyde, Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), analyses the ethical values reflected in the Commedia in relation to the classical, Christian and courtly ethical systems, and concludes with a discussion of Dante’s Ulysses seen against this background.
Jacques Le Goff,The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1984).
Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Lyric Poetry, trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), gives Dante’s sonnets to Forese Donati and Forese’s to Dante (Vol. 1, pp. 148–55) with an ample commentary (Vol. 2, pp. 242–53).
A seminal essay by Erich Auerbach called “Figura,” first published in German in 1938, is available in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. R. Mannheim (New York: Meridian, 1959), 11–76.
Piero Boitani, Dante’s Poetry of the Donati. The Barlow Lectures on Dante Delivered at University College London, 17–18 March 2005 (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2007), examines the role of this extended Florentine family in the Commedia.
Anthony Cassell, “ ‘Mostrando con le poppe il petto’ (Purg. xxiii 102),” Dante Studies 96 (1978): 75–81, cites the sumptuary laws introduced in 1310 by the newly appointed bishop of Florence that prohibited women’s dress from leaving uncovered any part of the torso, on pain of excommunication.
Rachel Jacoff, “ ‘Shadowy prefaces’: An Introduction to Paradiso,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 208–25.
Charles T. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), is the classic study of this subject.
Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). Augustine’s meditation on the trinitarian nature of the human mind occupies Books 9, 10 and 11; Book 10, chapters 11 and 12, focuses on memory, understanding and will.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, with an English translation by S. J. Tester (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978); Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. and with an introduction by V. E. Watts (London: Penguin Books, 1969).
Nick Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Patrick Boyde, Dante Philomythes: Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), gives a detailed account of Dante’s ideas about creation and the cosmos.
Mirko Tavoni, “Language and Style,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s Commedia, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Simon Gilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 95–109.
Mirko Tavoni, “Linguistic Italy,” in Dante in Context, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 243–59.
Erich Auerbach, “Sermo humilis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).
Carlo Rovelli, “Dante, Einstein and the Three-Sphere,” in There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness (Milton Keynes, UK: Allen Lane, 2020), 32–38. Mark A. Peterson, “Dante and the 3-Sphere,” in American Journal of Physics 47, no. 12 (December 1979): 1031–35. Mirko Tavoni, “L’universo di Dante è una 3-sfera?” in La mente di Dante. Visioni, Percezioni, Rappresentazioni, ed. Alessandra Beccarisi, et al. (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2024).
Steven Botterill, Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Saint Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum [Journey of the Mind to God], trans. Philotheus Boehner (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1956); The Mind’s Road to God, trans. and with an introduction and commentary by Philotheus Boehner (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2018).
Giuseppe Ledda, ed., Poesia e profezia nell’opera di Dante. Atti del Convegno internazionale di Studi, Ravenna, 11 novembre, 2017 (Ravenna: Centro Dantesco dei Frati Minori Conventuali, 2019).
Peter Dronke’s essays on Paradiso 30 (“Symbolism and Structure in Paradiso 30,” Romance Philology 43 [1989]: 29–48) and Paradiso 33 (“The Conclusion of Dante’s Commedia,” Italian Studies 49 [1994]: 21–39), reflect the author’s unrivalled knowledge of the medieval Latin sources and his sensitivity to poetic effect.
John Ahern, “Binding the Book: Hermeneutics and Manuscript Production in Paradiso 33,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 97 (1982): 800–809, discusses the implications of the volume-gatherings-pages-binding image at the end of the poem in relation to medieval bookmaking.
John A. Scott, Understanding Dante (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2004), offers a comprehensive, authoritative and judicious overview of Dante’s life and works.
Peter Hainsworth and David Robey, Dante. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
K. P. Clarke, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Reading Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). A detailed account of Dante’s Italian, close readings of selected passages from across the poem, and a rich and up-to-date bibliography make this a valuable aid for English-speaking readers.
Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi and Francesca Southerden, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Dante (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
T. S. Eliot, Dante (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).
Benedetto Croce, La poesia di Dante (Bari: Laterza, 1921).
Richard Lansing, ed., The Dante Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2010).
Umberto Bosco, ed., Enciclopedia dantesca, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 1984).
Charles G. Herbermann, et al., eds., The Catholic Encyclopedia, (New York: Robert Appleton, 1906). A version is available online.
David Robey, Sound and Structure in the Divine Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Rachel Jacoff, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Amilcare A. Iannucci, ed., Dante: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
Theodore J. Cachey, ed., Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
U. Limentani, ed., The Mind of Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
J. Freccero, ed., Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965).
Cecil Grayson, ed., The World of Dante: Essays on Dante and His Times (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
Zygmunt G. Barański and Lino Pertile, eds., Dante in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Zygmunt G. Barański and Simon Gilson, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
The California Lectura Dantis volumes offer readings in English of each canto of the poem (the quality is variable, but some are very good): Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn and Charles Ross, eds., Inferno: A Canto-by-Canto Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn and Charles Ross, Purgatorio: A Canto-by-Canto Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde, eds., Cambridge Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), has readings of ten cantos from across the poem.
George Corbett and Heather Webb, eds., Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Open Book, 2015–17).
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. from the German by Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953).
Alan C. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
V. H. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938).
Marc Cogan, The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).
Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds, eds., Dante in English (London: Penguin Books, 2005), is a collection of translations into English of passages from Dante, and passages from English poets influenced by Dante, from Chaucer to the present.
Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, Charles S. Singleton, Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), remains a fundamental work of reference.
Sandro Botticelli, The Drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000), reproduces all the surviving drawings.
Rossend Arqués Corominas and Marcello Ciccuto, eds.,Dante visualizzato. Carte ridenti I: XIV secolo (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2017).
Marcello Ciccuto and Leyla M. G. Liraghi, eds., Dante visualizzato. Carte ridenti II/1: XV secolo (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2019).
Matthew Collins, ed., Reading Dante with Images: A Visual Lectura Dantis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021).
The Società Dantesca Italiana: www.danteonline.it/index.html An invaluable resource for scholars and general readers alike. In cooperation with the Dante Society of America, the site maintains a comprehensive and regularly updated and searchable bibliography of all books and articles published on Dante worldwide. It lists all the surviving manuscripts of the poem. It hosts the digital edition of the Monarchia, with a complete image record for all extant manuscripts of the treatise and a detailed editorial analysis of their interrelationships.
The Dante Society of America: www.dantesociety.org A rich resource with links to many useful Dante-related digital projects and websites, including the Dartmouth Dante Project.
The Dartmouth Dante Project (DDP): https://dante.dartmouth.edu Contains all the early commentaries on the Commedia, and a great many later ones, which can be consulted line by line. Easily accessed from the Dante Society of America website.
The Princeton Dante Project: https://dante.princeton.edu This comprehensive Dante website offers the Petrocchi Italian text of the poem, the Hollander translation, texts and translations of all the minor works, supplementary material, and links to other Dante sites worldwide.
Dante Alighieri, Commedia: A Digital Edition: www.dantecommedia.it Edited by Prue Shaw, 2nd. ed. (Saskatchewan and Florence: Inkless Editions and Fondazione Franceschini, 2021). High-quality digitised colour images of five of the most important early manuscripts of the Commedia, including ms. Trivulziano 1080, whose layout gives a good idea of what the autograph of the poem might have looked like. An introductory essay (“indispensible reading for an understanding of the textual tradition of the Comedy,” K. P. Clarke) offers an overview of the problems facing an editor. Allowing for the paradox that one is using an electronic medium to do so, the images give the reader unmediated access to the experience of reading the poem as Dante’s contemporaries would have read it.
The Vocabolario Dantesco: www.vocabolariodantesco.it An ongoing project, directed by Paola Manni and Lino Leonardi, which provides entries for every vernacular word in the work of Dante.
The Vocabolario Dantesco Latino: www.vocabolariodantescolatino.it Another ongoing project, directed by Gabriella Albanese, Paolo Chiesa and Mirko Tavoni, which does the same for Dante’s Latin works.
Columbia Digital Dante Project: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy The Italian text of the Commedia alongside the Longfellow and Mandelbaum translations, with an extensive commentary in English by Teodolinda Barolini. Includes some of the minor works and contributions from other scholars on various aspects of Dante’s work.
The Illuminated Dante Project: www.dante.unina.it/idp This site, another ongoing project, aims to offer a complete image record of early illuminated manuscripts of the Commedia.
