This stands for “Monarchia,” underscoring Dante’s political belief that the world should be ruled by a temporal king or emperor. In addition to diagramming the levels of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, we find such drawings as the one accompanying the passage in Paradiso 18, in which a group of souls unite to form a letter M. This important scholarly find is heightened all the more by the unknown transcriber’s practice of annotating the book with marginal drawings copied from his source that served not only as aids to his own understanding of Dante, but also as instructions for subsequent readers. 1317–1380 CE), of which only the Inferno portion was previously known. Cornell’s first librarian Willard Fiske obtained the book for the University in 1893, in part spurred by the knowledge that his Harvard University Library counterpart had been unable to obtain one-a competitive demonstration important for a young university still establishing itself.Ĭornell’s copy is unique in that its margins feature the full transcription of a fourteenth-century commentary by Neapolitan scholar Guglielmo Maramauro (ca. The Foligno Dante edition helped Dante’s poem make the quantum leap from individual manuscript copies-treasured by scholars and collectors of means-to a much broader readership, and it spurred a steady flow of further editions in Italy over the next seventy-five years. This, the first printed edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, was printed a scant two decades after moveable type was first employed in Europe in an out-of-the-way place by an itinerant German printer whose relationship to Foligno ended after this one publication. Dante Alighieri Divina commedia Foligno, Johann Neumeister, 1472 Cornell Library, Rare and Manuscript Collections (2 images)
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