Boccaccio, Benvenuto, and the First Dante Scholars: Medieval Commentaries You Can Read Today
Dante died in 1321, but by the 1330s, something extraordinary was happening across Italian cities. Scholars were being hired—publicly, formally—to lecture on the Divine Comedy to crowded rooms of paying listeners. No poem had ever demanded this kind of organized interpretation before. Within a few decades, four major commentaries emerged that would shape how readers … Read more