Resources for the Study of Dante

• Voice of the Shuttle: Italian Literature
• ILTweb: Digital Dante: Dante-related Resources on the Net – A website provided by Columbia University’s Institute for Learning Technologies (ILTweb), it “integrates . . . multimedia, as well as hyperlinked text commentary and other materials, into the reading of the Commedia in an innovative way — a way not previously possible in non-digital media. The Digital Dante Project is essentially a twenty-first-century illumination — one that intends to take advantage of the existing technical possibilities of our contemporary culture to create a viewpoint — a twenty-first-century dantisti viewpoint–of contemporary and historical culture, much like Dante’s original work was (in addition to allegory) a thirteenth-century viewpoint of then contemporary and historical culture.” For a different version of this site, click here
• Otfried Lieberknecht’s Dante Alighieri: A Guide to Online Resources – Sponsored by the ORB: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies.
• Otfried Lieberknecht’s Homepage for Dante Studies – If your browser does not support frames and JavaScript or you prefer not to use them, click here.
• Dante Society – An online Service for Dante scholars provided by the Dante Society Of America, this website includes a link to the American Dante Bibliography, an annotated bibliography of Dante studies from 1953-1995. Includes the Princeton Dante Project (see below)
• The Princeton Dante Project – An elaborate, innovative site for studying the works of Dante. It includes the authoritative Petrocchi text of The Divine Comedy; the verse translation of Inferno by Robert Hollander, which can be viewed in parallel columns with the Italian or by itself; audio of both the Italian and English, along with images and other multimedia features; lectures on Dante’s life and the historical, cultural and literary background of the Comedy; bibliography; commentary and notes. Finally, the text and translation allow you to click on direct links to the line by line commentaries in the Dartmouth Dante Project and to switch easily back and forth between commentaries in all languages and commentaries only in English. For a direct link to the Dartmouth Dante Project, see below. The Princeton Dante Project requires registration and password entry, but registration is free and quick.
• The Dartmouth Dante Project – Contains over 50 commentaries on The Divine Comedy, beginning with that of Dante’s son, Jacopo Alighieri, and including the commentaries by Boccaccio, Longfellow and Singleton. You can search by book (cantica), canto, and line numbers and limit the responses according to the language of the commentaries (e.g., English, Latin, Italian). Note that, although it is not possible to search for a range of line numbers (e.g., 31-54 for all three beasts), if you give the first line of a passage, the database will usually return commentary on the entire passage.
• Digital Dante – Columbia University’s Dante web site, which contains the translations of the Commedia by Longfellow and Allen Mandelbaum and the commentary of Teodolinda Barolini in English.
• American Dante Bibliography – Annotated bibliographies of Dante scholarship from 1953-2012. You can browse through each year or search by keywords. There are also links to un-annotated bibliographies of Dante scholarship in the British Isles from 1980-2000 and in Italy from 1988-1990.
• Danteworlds – Danteworlds, created under the auspices of Guy Raffa at the University of Texas, Austin, is “an integrated multimedia journey–combining images, textual commentary, and audio–through the various regions of hell described in Dante’s Inferno. The site is structured around a visual representation of hell: it shows who and what appear where. Clicking on a region or circle of hell . . . opens a new page depicting the principal creatures and people whom the character Dante meets in the region. Click on individual figures in the circle to view a close-up of the image in a pop-up window. Click on their names in the list of ‘icons’ for pertinent information. Also available for each infernal circle are links to ‘allusions,’ ‘study questions,’ recordings of selected ‘Italian verses,’ and a ‘gallery’ of artistic images–all aimed at a better understanding of the region under consideration.”
• The World of Dante – Created under the editorship of Deborah Parker, chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia, who has taught the Commedia for over 25 years, “The World of Dante” is a multi-media tool for research in Dante in both Italian and English.  It includes texts, interactive maps, diagrams, music, and other useful features.
• The Visions of the Knight Tondale – A clever multimedia display of a pre-Dantean vision of the afterlife, a 15th-century manuscript of a 12th-century Latin text by an Irish monk that was one of the most popular works in the Middle Ages (with nearly 250 surviving manuscripts, some in translation) and the most widely read vision of Hell and Heaven before it was supplanted by The Divine Comedy.

General Resources for Medieval Studies

The Douay-Rheims Bible – A Catholic translation of the Vulgate Bible into English, often closer to the Latin text that medieval authors would have known than any more modern translations, Catholic or Protestant. If a student can’t read the medieval Latin Vulgate itself, this is the translation to use. Also available at Intratext Library, which contains a built-in concordance for many of the words.

The Catholic Encyclopedia – An excellent first stop for research into Catholic doctrine and the history of the medieval Catholic Church.

Medieval Sourcebook – Fordham University’s website with links to translations of many medieval texts, including Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon, a source of the antifeminist tradition and The Wife of Bath’s Tale.

The Labyrinth – A prime site for all medieval resources on the World Wide Web.

The Online Reference Book (ORB) for Medieval Studies – This is an archived version of the site originally edited by the late Kathryn Talarico and no longer maintained at the original URL, the-orb.net. Though it was available until July 2015, this link is to Archive.org’s December 23, 2012, snapshot, because more of the links are still active as Archive.org sub-pages. Especially useful for students are the entries in the ORB Encyclopedia, the Textbook Library, Of General Interest, and E-Texts. Scholars will be pleased that Jim Marchand’s “What Every Medievalist Should Know” is intact.

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