Digital Monarchia

This website contains high-resolution digital images and detailed transcriptions of all surviving witnesses of Dante’s Monarchia (21 manuscripts and the editio princeps); an apparatus of all textual variants in three forms (complete, positive, negative); the Latin text of the National Edition; English and Italian translations; and a stemma codicum. A drop-down menu offers various ways of viewing these materials, in combination or separately. Sophisticated software allows easy magnification and movement around the images. Drop-down menus allow the user to choose a particular manuscript and form of the apparatus. Book-chapter-paragraph buttons and folio and paragraph buttons allow easy movement around the text.

A comprehensive introduction by the editor explains the methodology of the transcriptions, analyses the interrelationships between the witnesses, and presents the editorial rationale which guides the choice of readings contained in the edited text. As well as providing all the primary evidence for scholars wishing to explore the textual tradition of Dante’s treatise, and a detailed scholarly analysis of that evidence, the website will be a valuable teaching tool for palaeographers, codicologists and textual critics.

This second edition of the digital Monarchia, created using standard software in the hope of guaranteeing sustainability, was launched in Florence in November 2019. (The first edition was publised in 2006 on DVD-Rom.) The website is freely available to scholars, students and general readers at www.danteonline.it/monarchia