The early commentators

The Commedia’s wealth of concepts, abundance of historical and mythological references, and use of allegorical meanings led, immediately after Dante’s death, to a wide range of commentaries on the poem. Written in Latin and the various vernaculars of Italy, they adopted a variety of approaches: straightforward interlinear annotation; substantial but disordered and often anonymous glosses; complex organic commentaries aiming at providing an extensive explanation of each single line of the Commedia. The phenomenon was important not only on account of the large number of comments produced, but also for the impressive extent of the manuscript tradition of some of the commentaries (there are almost one hundred codices of the commentary by Jacomo della Lana and just as many for Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary). The contribution of these early commentaries towards an understanding of the actual letter of Dante’s poem is frequently irreplaceable, particularly in terms of linguistic usage and factual information about places, people and events recorded in the Commedia. The intertextual insights provided are also valuable, as is the information on Date’s life and works (such as the explicit attribution to Dante of the much-disputed Epistle XIII, contained in the gloss by Andrea Lancia and in Filippo Villani’s commentary). It should also be remembered that the cultural horizon of these early readers, even taking each individually, is far closer to Dante’s than ours is. Among the most important texts are the fourteenth century commentaries by Jacopo Alighieri, Bambaglioli, Guido da Pisa, Maramauro and Boccaccio, and Guiniforte Barzizza’s commentary of the fifteenth century, all of which were limited to Inferno. Covering all three cantiche are the commentaries by Jacomo della Lana, Ottimo, Pietro Alighieri (available in three different redactions), Andrea Lancia, Benvenuto da Imola, and Francesco da Buti, all dating before the end of the fourteenth century, and the commentary by Giovanni da Serravalle with a complete Latin translation of the Commedia, written for the Council of Constance between 1416 and 1417.