The research project aims to produce a new critical edition, enhanced through tools and procedures for digital encoding, of the Comentum Inferni written by Benvenuto da Imola between 1379 and 1383.
The study involves a systematic revision of the commentary through the complete examination of its manuscript tradition, with the goal of reconstructing the stemma codicum and establishing a reliable text. At the same time, a digital XML-TEI edition will be created, allowing for in-depth markup of the text, its classical and modern sources, previous exegetical influences, and the various stages of composition.
Benvenuto’s exegetical work, he being considered one of the most learned Dante commentators of the fourteenth century, enjoyed wide manuscript circulation and stands out among early commentaries on the Commedia both for its extensive reuse of the preceding exegetical tradition, systematically subjected to critical assessment and interpretive verification, and for its influence on subsequent interpreters of the poem.
The project is structured in three phases: collation and analysis of the manuscript tradition; establishment of the text and its digital encoding; study of the sources and digital construction of the commentator’s “library.” The goal is to provide a rigorously prepared and interoperable critical edition, valuable to scholars of Dantean philology as well as to those of medieval and humanistic culture.