Dante’s Divine Comedy

Did You Know?

Instant Classic
Students today may grumble about having to read the Dante’s Divine Comedy, but Dante’s contemporaries loved it. More than 600 fourteenth-century copies survive, attesting to its wide circulation. At least 12 commentaries had been written about it by 1400. Later it was among the earliest books to be set in movable type. But the poem lost favor with the rise of rationalism, and only three editions were printed in the seventeenth century. The Pre-Raphaelites helped bring the poem back into fashion in the nineteenth century, and its status now seems assured. More than 50 English translations of Inferno were published in the twentieth century alone.