INFERNO, Episode 38. Nothing In Dante's Own Hand: A Brief History Of COMEDY's Manuscripts

In this interpolated episode—since, after all, we came to a break, or an almost break, or a change in the poem at the start of Canto VIII of INFERNO—I want to talk about the history of the COMEDY manuscripts. We don’t have anything in Dante’s own hand. So what do we have? And how do we know we can trust what we have?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I talk through (rather briefly!) the three facts you need to know about the manuscript history, the problem of commentaries being written before we have a dated manuscript, and the notions of how texts get corrupted over time.

Sure, this one’s a bit in the weeds. But I find it endlessly fascinating.