Commedia: A Digital Edition ed. by Prue Shaw

Abstract

Reviewed by: Commedia: A Digital Editioned. by Prue Shaw Elizabeth Coggeshall Commedia: A Digital Edition, 2nded. Edited by Prue Shaw. Florence: Fondazione Ezio Franceschini; Saskatoon: Inkless Editions, 2021. https://www.dantecommedia.it. ISBN: 1-904628-21-4. T he year 2021 wasmomentous for Dante studies, marking, as it did, the seventh centenary of the poet's death. Universities, scholarly societies, museums, libraries, and other public-serving institutions commemorated the occasion with in-person and online talks and conferences, curated exhibits, performances, and other celebratory remembrances of the anniversary of Dante's death in Ravenna in September 1321. Among these commemorative exercises, one of the most noteworthy was the release of the second edition of Prue Shaw's digital Commedia, published by Inkless Editions (formerly Scholarly Digital Editions) and SISMEL. The CommediaProject, which uses computer analysis to analyze seven key [End Page 167]witnesses in the poem's early manuscript tradition, was originally published on DVD-ROM in 2010. Since then, it has proven to be one of the most valuable resources for the study of the poem's early transmission, even if access to it was limited. The revised edition of the project expands the reach of this rich resource: unlike its limited-access predecessor, the 2021 edition was published as an open-access, free website (https://www.dantecommedia.it/), featuring several new or expanded tools for research. Much like the DVD, the 2021 website presents an information-rich critical edition of the Commedia, with transcriptions of the so-called Sanguineti seven: Ash (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 828), Ham (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 203), LauSC (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 26 sin. 1), Mart (Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Aldina AP XVI 25), Rb (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS Ricc. 1005; and Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, MS AG XII 2), Triv (Milan, Biblioteca dell'Archivio Storico Civico e Trivulziana, MS Trivulziano 1080), and Urb (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Urb. lat. 366). These are seven complete manuscripts that Federico Sanguineti had identified to compile his 2001 critical edition, revising Giuseppe Petrocchi's 1966–67 Edizione nazionale, which had, until Sanguineti's revision, been nearly universally adopted as the standard edition of the Commedia. The CommediaProject team originally set out to test the validity of Sanguineti's stemma using computerized phylogenetic analysis. The results of that analysis are presented at length in the site's editorial material, which is largely reprinted from the original edition. Shaw's DVD-ROM edition has been much discussed, and its methods and conclusions debated (see, e.g., Giorgio Inglese, "Rev. of Dante Alighieri, Commedia. A Digital Edition, ed. Prue Shaw," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana189, no. 627 [2012]: 453–5; Vera Ribaudo, "Nuovi orizzonti dell'ecdotica? L'edizione elettronica della Monarchiae della Commediadi Prue Shaw," L'Alighieri42, no. 2 [2013]: 95–127; Paolo Trovato, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann's Method[Libreriauniversitaria, 2014], 208–18; Elena Spadini, "Processing Dante's Commedia: From Sanguineti's Edition to Digital Tools," RIDE3 [2015]). As reviewers have noted, the 2010 edition has much to commend it, features that the revised edition retains or [End Page 168]enhances: meticulous transcriptions that render both text and editorial interventions exactly as they appear on the page; high-resolution images of manuscript folios (excepting MS Urb. lat. 366 of the Vatican Library, excluded at that time because of copyright restrictions but now fully visualizable on the revised site); accurate and thorough witness descriptions, including their paleographical and codicological features; clear, functional, and effective tools for collation; variant maps, wherein relationships between witnesses are graphed as "unrooted phylograms" representing proximity and divergence from one another; and the VBase tool, a proprietary software for complex variant analysis. Many of these features are more prominently displayed or more easily accessible on the revised site, such as the variant maps, which appear in thumbnail images alongside the collation, and VBase, now much more readily accessed through a single click on the static header (previously VBase was only accessible at the bottom of the long drop-down menu in the editorial material). Because much has been said of...