DANTE ALIGHIERI.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

La Divina Commedia. First Boschini edition, very possibly the first edition of the complete Italian text printed in the British Isles.Romualdo Zotti's edition also appeared in 1808 and is often cited in the trade as the first edition printed in Britain, but priority remains uncertain. Toynbee listed this first in his bibliography: "This (or the [Zotti edition] published the same year) is the first edition of the complete text of the Commedia printed and published in England. (An edition, with the imprint Londra, had appeared in 1778, but this was actually printed at Leghorn). A brief Life of Dante is prefixed to the first volume. It contains no notes" (Toynbee, p. 44). We could find no subsequent scholarship that sheds further light on which edition has priority. This edition is certainly rarer than the Zotti edition, both institutionally and in commerce.Coluzzi places both editions within "the phase of broad commercialisation [that] began with an increase in the number of annotated and plain-text copies... Compared to Zotti's bulky format and didactic commentary, Boschini's edition was slimmer in format and more concise in content" (Coluzzi).Boschini has left little trace, though he also edited editions of Il Pastor Fido (1809), Petrarch's Rime (1809), Tasso's Aminta (1809) and La Gerusalemme liberata (1813), and Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1815).

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