1613, Vicenza: FRANCESCO LENI






1629, Padua: DONATO PASQUARDI






1629, Venice: NICOLO MISSERINI






While approximately thirty editions of the Divine Comedy were published during the 16th century, only three appeared in the 17th -- and all within the first thirty years of that century. No other work by Dante was published in Italy at all during the 17th century, with the exception of one edition of the De vulgari eloquentia included in an anthology of rhetorical texts (Venice, 1643). Dante's fortune slid into a trough during the 17th century and would only make its way up the slope again a century later. The sad state of Dante's reputation is best illustrated by the small size and unrefined presentation of these humble editions produced at the beginning of the 17th century.

Hostility toward Dante had been building in Catholic Italy, based in part on Counter-Reformation suspicion of what looked like dangerously pre-Lutheran elements in the ideological structure of the Comedy, and upon the selective use religious reformers made of Dante in the 16th century. The Comedy was put on the Index in 1614, with the injunction that certain passages be expurgated, including Inferno XIX, 48-117 (simoniac popes); Purgatorio XIX, 106-18 (on Pope Adrian V's avarice and conversion); and Paradiso IX, 136-142 (against the avarice of the Vatican high clergy).

In literary terms, the early 17th century's more hedonistic view of poetry, as against that of the previous few generations, worked against Dante. Particular attention paid to outward beauty and form characterized the baroque aesthetic, which was essentially at odds with Dante's poetry. F. Guarino spoke for his age when he wrote in 1620:
You sculpt well, Dante, but you do not polish;
you are good, but not beautiful;
you benefit, but do not please,
and with too much knowledge you oppress the Muse.
(L'Inferno d'amore, canto V)

As did Paolo Beni (1552-1625) who wrote in his Il Cavalcanti (1614) that Dante's

... slack lines, forced rhymes, various improprieties, insufferable obscenities, frequent affectations, and, to be brief, the horrid, stupid, licentious style, along with endless other errors of learning and art, show clearly that Dante was a worse than awful Poet, so little did he have any right to claim superiority over other Poets. And so it seems to me that he was very unfortunate, with a Poem in which one can perceive no industry or need of effort, that it should make him (so he sings) grow thin (the word is his) for many years.

Yet another reason for the 17th century's rejection of Dante is that during that phase of "the battle between the ancients and the moderns," Dante was deemed to be too primitive, and as occupying a position in vernacular literary history which had been superseded. The rejection of Dante emerges also from the polemics with which the modernists reacted to the decision by the Crusca Academy to base its Vocabolario of 1612 primarily on the language of the 14th-century classics, to the exclusion of more recent writers and those from other regions. Thus, the dismissal of Dante had everything to do with advancing the cause of the moderns.

1613 Edition

1629 Paduan Edition

1629 Venetian Edition