Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (1373-5).

In 1373, some of the citizens of Florence petitioned the comune (city government) for a public reading and explanation of Dante’s Commedia. As the acknowledged expert on matters Dante in Florence, Boccaccio was appointed to the task for a period of one year, and began his readings on Sunday 23 October 1373, in the church of Santo Stefano di Badia. Although records are scarce, it seems from the manuscript evidence that Boccaccio gave about 55 lectures in total before he fell ill and suspended the series at canto 17 of the Inferno. He was never well enough again to resume his lecturae, and died on December 21, 1375.

The text of Boccaccio's lecture notes has survived, and is generally known as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. Boccaccio's Esposizioni are thus the final testament of Boccaccio's lifelong engagement with Dante, and in addition to their usefulness as a commentary, serve as a vast encyclopaedia of late medieval thought, knowledge, and literary concerns.

The task of developing an electronic version of this commentary has allowed us to address, define, and finally, visualize the relationship between the primary (commented) text and the secondary (commentary) text. We are at an early stage of this project, and would therefore welcome any comments from interested parties as we begin to implement it. For more information, please visit our weblog , particularly the posts on the Esposizioni.

For our work, we have chosen as the reference text Giorgio Padoan's critical edition of the Esposizioni (Milano: Mondadori, 1994. First published in: Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tutte le opere, ed. Vittore Branca. Milano: Mondadori, 1965.)

Team members and collaborators

• Guyda Armstrong, Research Fellow, Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh
• Pietro Beltrami, Professor of Romance Philology and Linguistics, University of Pisa, Italy
• Paul Caton, Research Analyst, Scholarly Technology Group, Brown University
• Cristiana Fordyce, Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian, College of the Holy Cross
• Michael Papio, Assistant Professor of French and Italian, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
• Vika Zafrin, Project Director, NEH/Brown University