Word-level glossary of medieval Tuscan forms in Dante, from archaic spellings to lost verb tenses.
Lucy Bamboo · July 20, 2026
I learned the hard way that a modern Italian dictionary won’t help with half of Dante’s vocabulary. When I first tackled the Divine Comedy, I’d look up a word, find nothing, and panic. Then I’d discover it was perfectly common in 14th-century Tuscany. That gap between medieval Italian and modern Italian is where reading Dante … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 14, 2026
When I first opened the Commedia, I thought my Italian had failed me. Every third page threw unfamiliar verb forms at me. I encountered past tenses that didn’t match my textbook, contractions I’d never seen, conjugations that looked almost right but weren’t. I started keeping a list. Then I realized: these weren’t mistakes or dialect … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 7, 2026
I didn’t realize how much drama was hidden in Dante’s pronoun choices until someone pointed it out. Now I can’t un-see it. Every time I reread the Commedia, I catch myself watching for those tiny Italian words—tu and voi—like they’re secret messages written in plain sight. And honestly? They are. In medieval Tuscan Italian, the … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 5, 2026
When I first opened the Divine Comedy, the spelling stopped me cold. Words I recognized suddenly looked foreign. “Ogne” instead of “ogni.” “Etterno” stretched across the page. Once I learned to see these patterns, the text opened up. What seemed like chaos was actually consistent medieval Tuscan orthography—14th-century Florentine, to be precise. These aren’t errors. … Read more
