Book

As stated before, the book that is being looked at is La Commedia, also known as The Divine Comedy, by medieval writer Dante Alighieri. The book is split into three parts; Inferno, where Dante is being led by Virgil (the author of the Aeneid among other things) through Hell, Purgatorio, where Dante is again led by Virgil but this time through Purgatory, and finally Paradiso, where Virgil is left behind and Dante is given a tour of Heaven by his dead love Beatrice. It is for her that Dante wrote this book, as after she had died he was consumed with grief and so he delved into philosophy, finally making a vow that “he would write of Beatrice what had never yet been written of any woman”.¹ He accomplished this by making the main thrust of the plot of La Commedia to get to see her again in Heaven.

Otherwise, the pages are weathered due to their age and uneven due to the manner in which they were made in medieval times. There are also holes present in the manuscript, most likely due to insect bites from the animal before it died. The codex itself is of a fairly large size, the length and width of it are comparable to the size of a standard high school textbook, while the thickness is on the scale of phone books and dictionaries. The illustrations within the manuscript are done in many colours and even utilize gold, which means that this manuscript must have been made for someone with a good amount of wealth. The pages themselves are split into two different parts: the poem itself is in the middle of the page, alternating the beginning letter of the stanzas in either blue or red, while the commentary by Jacopo Alighieri is all around it in a smaller font. The book has clearly seen some use, as while some of the pages are easy to read due to the letters being perfectly preserved, some other pages have words that are very hard to make out and they usually appear to be around the edges of the parchment, meaning that people have been rubbing the ink with their fingers as they turned the page. It is possible to see annotations in the margins that seem different than those by Jacopo in the rest of the manuscript. Also, there is evidence of catchwords on the bottom of some of the pages and guiding lines on others. There seem to be points where the scribes made mistakes, as some of the starting initials are not coloured in like the rest. Manicules can be found throughout the text, either relating something that Jacopo says to the poem or simply pointing something out. Additionally, there are page numbers at the top right of the right side pages, and they count both sides of the page as the same page as opposed to the modern way of counting each side of a page as one. In the illuminations, it begins with Dante wearing the colour blue while Virgil wears orange or red, but by about half-way through the Inferno, Dante ends up in a pink or lavender coloured outfit while Virgil wears an outfit with both blue and orange/red.

Finally, relevant to this analysis about censorship, it is difficult to tell whether this manuscript has been censored or not due to possible censorships looking simply like damage to the manuscript. It even looks like it may have had an encounter with a fire at some point. However, there are two places within the Inferno that look very much like censorship by way of covering the words in ink. This assumption can be made due to the accuracy of the smudge on certain words, or on a complete passage instead of just blocking out the left side of a paragraph like some other smudges.