1716, Naples: FRANCESCO LAINO

Three quarters of a century separate the last edition of the Comedy to be published in the 17th century and the first to be published in the 18th (Verona, 1702). The second edition to be published in the 18th century is presented here. It reproduces the Crusca Academy text of 1595, and thus represents the continuation of the 16th-century textual tradition in an altered cultural environment.

Dante becomes for the first time an object of attention for the kind of erudite scholarship which characterizes much of early 18th-century culture in Italy. Thus Dante is inscribed in the literary histories composed during the early years of the century by Muratori, Crescimbeni, Quadrio and Tiraboschi among others, as a figure standing at the origins of an Italian national literature. This historical recovery of Dante as a founder of Italian literature helped to attenuate the harsh judgements which were otherwise typical of both neo-classical and baroque responses to the poet.

Another response to 18th-century neo-classical disdain for Dante was to characterize the primitive qualities of his writings as strengths and not weaknesses. Giambattista Vico (1668-1774), author of Principi di una scienza nuova (The New Science, 1725 and 1730) is the most famous proponent of this view. Vico viewed Dante as another Homer and Dante's Middle Ages as a "barbarous" time comparable to the time of ancient Greece, where the imagination and the heroic spirit prevailed: "The Comedy of Dante is to be read on three counts: as a history of barbaric times in Italy, as the source of very beautiful Tuscan ways of speaking, and as an example of sublime poetry."

But while Dante had become worthy of attention and sometimes admiration during the early 18th century, he was not yet considered central enough to the concerns of 18th-century criticism to merit sustained attention. Nevertheless, it was in the 18th century that the seeds of future critical developments were sown, especially in the new awareness of Dante as the founding poet of an Italian nation, and in a new appreciation for the sublime power of his poetic inspiration. The latter would eventually bring Dante to the foreground during the Romantic period.