Cultural Mediations and Material Contexts of Dante’s Commedia: The Case of Beinecke MS 428

Abstract

The textual and cultural interpretations related to the material construction of the first manuscript copies of Dante’s Commedia play a crucial role in shaping its transmission and inevitably also the text that we read today. The processes of preparation and the material structures of these codices, in fact, often reflect more the culture in which they were created than the culture of the original work itself. Starting from a reflection about issues of cultural mediations and material contexts of the early diffusion of Dante’s Commedia, this article introduces a new case study: fourteenth-century manuscript Beinecke Library MS 428, a deluxe copy commissioned by the Bini family.