Breaking Barriers in Dante Studies
Following the international Festa di Dante celebrations of May 1865, women writers entered the intensely competitive and male-dominated world of Dante scholarship with remarkable determination.
Charting Women's Works
The Archive revals women's multifaceted engagement with Dante: from scholarly articles and dissertations to poetry, novels, dramatic plays, musical adaptations, and children's literature.
Discover how they transformed Dante studies across every creative, critical and scholarly genres of reception.
Mapping the Publishing Landscape
The archive includes a special section tracking the publishers who brought Dante-related works to readers. Each publisher entry documents their location and the works they produced, creating a detailed map of how Dante's writings spread across different regions and time periods.
This publishing history reveals which publishers played key roles in sharing knowledge about Dante. By connecting data from the Reportorio Editoriale Italiano and the Ottocento catalog, the archive shows how different publishing houses contributed to making Dante's works accessible to wider audiences.
Understanding who published these works helps us see the bigger picture of how Dante's influence traveled. Some publishers specialized in scholarly editions, while others focused on popular adaptations that reached everyday readers.
This comprehensive view of the publishing world shows not just what was written about Dante, but how these works reached readers and shaped public understanding of Italy's greatest poet across generations and geographic boundaries.
Discovering Hidden Collections
The archive also tracks where Dante collections exist today in libraries across Britain, Ireland, and Italy. By mapping these holdings, we can see how Dante's works are distributed geographically and discover rare materials that might be hidden in unexpected places.
This information helps us understand not only how Dante's works spread historically, but also opens up new possibilities for research and public exploration. Knowing where collections are located makes it easier for scholars and curious readers to access these materials.
The digital archive has now become a physical exhibition you can visit in person. Located at the Centro Dantesco dei Frati Minori Conventuali in Ravenna, Italy, the exhibition is free to the public and runs until February 27, 2025.
This exhibition brings the archive's discoveries to life, allowing visitors to engage directly with the story of women's contributions to Dante scholarship and the broader history of how his works have been preserved and shared across centuries.
