Beschreibung:

Dante Alighieri, Commedia: Inferno X, 1-90, in Tuscan Italian, single leaf from a decorated manuscript on parchment [Italy (probably Tuscany), last quarter of fourteenth century or very early fifteenth century] Single leaf, with single column of 45 lines in brown ink an early semi-humanist hand of highest grade (written space: 177 by 78mm.), with some near-contemporary corrections changing spellings and entire readings of words in hairline thin black ink, capitals set in margin apart from main lines and touched in red, remnants of Canzo number X in upper outer corner of text in red, one large initial O (opening Ora sen va per un secreto …) in red enclosed within swirling blue penwork with long whip-like tendrils reaching into the margins in sweeping curves and vertical penstrokes encased within other curling tendrils (close to those in another fourteenth-century Dante manuscript: Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale, MS. 818; see also that now Cortona, Biblioteca Comunale e dell'Accademia Etrusca, MS. 88, also of fourteenth century), one 5-line fifteenth-century marginal addition on reverse on Farinatas connections with the Ghibelline faction (glossing verses 87-89), recovered from reuse in a binding and hence with losses at corners and edges, some worm damage and discolouration, a few lines of text damaged but mostly legible, overall in fair and presentable condition, 275 by 205mm. A nearly emergent leaf from the most important literary work of the entire Middle Ages, with numerous orthographic and textual variants Provenance: This is most probably all the remains of a high grade manuscript written and decorated for a wealthy patron in the last quarter of fourteenth century, probably in Tuscany. The measured and elegant semi-humanist script puts the parent manuscript among the very finest products of fourteenth-century vernacular book production, and sets this quite apart from the more common Cento group mass-copied in Florence in the same period. As such it represents a rare opportunity for study of a de luxe copy of the text produced outside the homogenous Cento group in a centre probably far from Florence. 2. Recently discovered in an Italian collection, and with an export license from that country. Previously unknown and unrecorded by scholarship. Text: Some works of medieval literature have made such an impact in the collective cultural heritage of the West that they have touched the lives of almost every generation of readers since their composition. Chaucer is in this category, as perhaps is Wolfram von Eschenbach, Rudolf von Emms, Christine de Pisan, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and for northern Europe, we might add also add Snorri Sturluson. Paramount among this small and select gathering of names is that of Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321), the foremost poet of the Italian language, whose works all but founded the modern Italian. This leaf is from what is widely regarded to be the most important literary work of the entire Middle Ages, the grand and exquisitely beautiful Divine Comedy. It was completed by 1321 in the last months of the authors life and found immediate fame. Echoes of his work are legion and found throughout European literature from the fourteenth century to today, from Boccaccios evident devotion in his Trattatello in laude di Dante, to T.S. Eliots statement Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third. Jorge Luis Borges declared it the best book literature has achieved. By happy chance, this leaf contains the celebrated opening of Canto X of the Inferno, in which the author enters the sixth circle of Hell, that inhabited by heretics, and talks with Farinata degli Uberti (who denied life after death, and was exhumed and tried posthumuously in 1283) and Cavalcante Cavalcanti (probably an atheist, whose son, Guido, was Dantes closest friend and arguably his poetic master, and who married the daughter of Farinata) as they lie in their fiery tombs that sit unsealed until after