About the Author
About the Author
Prue Shaw was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. Leaving her home shores in 1962 on a graduate scholarship to study at the University of Florence, she became part of a postwar exodus of young Australian intellectuals, which included Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and her future husband, Clive James. Her years in Florence studying under the great philologist Gianfranco Contini gave her an abiding love of both the city and its great poet, Dante Alighieri. Her studies eventually brought her to Britain, first to Oxford and then to Cambridge, where she taught modern Italian language and literature. When she later moved to the University of London, her modernist colleagues were delighted to let her take sole responsibility for the Dante teaching, regarded by them as something of a chore. She remains Emeritus Reader at University College.
In the 1980s, Shaw was early to spot the potential of digital technology for comparing the divergent manuscripts of medieval literary texts, such as Dante’s Commedia, for which no autograph manuscript survives. She spent decades wresthng with unwieldy computer printouts and competing for time on university mainframes, until the technology evolved sufficiently to allow her groundbreaking open-access digital editions of the Commedia and Monarchia, which make images of key manuscripts from libraries all over the world and scholarly analysis of their variant texts freely accessible online to expert and novice alike. (See https://www.dantecommedia.it/ and https://www.danteonline.it/index.html.)
Shaw is the editor of the edizione nazionale of Dante’s medieval Latin treatise Monarchia—the only non-Italian to have achieved the distinction of being asked to edit a text in this prestigious series. In 2014 she was awarded a medal by the city of Florence for her contribution to Dante studies.
Prue Shaw’s many happy years of teaching Dante to students prompted her in retirement to write Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, whose aim was to make the poet and his poem accessible to poetry lovers with little or no Italian. The same aim inspires this new book, Dante: The Essential Commedia.
Prue Shaw lives in Cambridge, England.