A New Spanish Translation of the Commedia and Dante’s Renaissance Readers (1491-1550 ca)

This essay focuses on two early copies of Dante’s vernacular poetry with idiosyncratic interventions by Renaissance readers: a 1491 Venetian incunable of the Commedia with an extensive translation of the poem into Spanish and copious annotations in Spanish and Latin (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct. 2Q inf. 1.43); and an early Venetian printed edition of Dante’s lyric poetry (1518) with notes, substantial marks, and underlinings, bound together ab antiquo with a copy of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina and a vernacularization of Petrarch’s Secretum (London, British Library, C.20.a.13). These books show Dante’s success among Spanish (or hispanophile) readers both as a moral and didactic poet, and as a linguistic and stylistic model. Through an analysis of these two early copies of Dante's vernacular poetry, this essay looks at readers of Dante’s works in order to reveal the transnational quality of their publics and, in so doing, invite us to reorient our view of Dante’s role as a function of discourse.