"The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante's 'Commedia' seamlessly weaves together art history, book history, and literary history in a fascinating exploration of these illustrations, revealing profound connections between art, literature, and history." —Rhoda Eitel-Porter, co-author of Italian Renaissance Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum"Having already set new standards in visual Dante studies with his innovative editorial project Reading Dante with Images, Matthew Collins integrates visual sources such as the Morgan drawings and the Marcolini Dante into histories of production, perception, and interpretation. His enlightening and engaging book will lead readers into the sibling disciplines of art and literature, print and poetry, Italian and Dante studies, and, not least, into a fresh approach to the history of technology." —Henrike Christiane Lange, author of Giotto's Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility"Elegantly written and rigorously researched, Matthew Collins's The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante's "Commedia" provides us with both a wealth of new analyses and a set of new approaches to what it means to illustrate and visualize Dante's poem in print, and all the complex and multifaceted relations between word and image this involved. The book will be of immense value not only to all students of Dante and his reception, but also to cultural, literary and art historians, and to all those working on print and visual culture." —Simon Gilson, author of Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante