25. Changes

Abstract

Over the centuries, much scholarship on Dante’s Commedia has taken the form of the lectura Dantis, in which one digs as deeply as one can into the depths of the poem’s text. The project of Cambridge’s vertical readings, on the other hand, is reminiscent not of the deep shafts dug by miners but rather of long narrow trenches, of the sort gently excavated by archaeologists. The trenches we are digging in our enterprise follow not a physical structure but a numerical one. Someone like Dante, who..