Dante Critical Texts

It is even a banal observation that the greatest challenge for Italian philology is embodied, today as yesterday, by the constitution of the text of Dante's Comedy. Over the years, numerous proposals have been made by scholars, both male and female, who have devised various solutions to try to "put order" in the dark forest of a tradition that includes more than 800 manuscripts and to restore a readable and coherent text.

Dante Critical Texts (DCT) is a computer tool that allows you to explore a large corpus of critical texts of the Comedy, enabling searches on verbal occurrences (through the Search function) and comparisons between different editions that highlight variations in readings (through the Texts function). Starting from the first critical edition prepared by Karl Witte in 1862 to the most recent ones, released on the occasion of the poet's seven-hundredth anniversary of death, the project aims to make the major results of Dante philology accessible and interrogable.

DCT is part of the Naples Dante Project, a network of digital projects active at the University of Naples Federico II which aims to investigate Dante's work through the integrated study of material, iconographic, and (as in the present case) textual evidence.