This DVD-ROM promises to provide a "full edited text, English translation, transcripts and images of all 20 manuscripts and of the editio princeps, with collations, commentaries, and search and visualization tools" of Dante's Monarchia. As the description suggests, this remarkable digital edition goes far beyond the conventional confines of the critical edition by providing users not only with a critical text but also with access to the materials that led to that text's construction. Scholars who are still concerned about Dante's reference to the Paradiso in Monarchia I.xii.6 ("sicut in Paradiso Comedie iam dixi" [as I have already said in the Paradiso of the Comedy]), for example, can now consult the two manuscripts and the editio princeps in which the phrase is omitted. One can quickly verify Shaw's claim that both manuscripts leave a blank space where the text should be, and be convinced by her suggestion that the text was in their exemplar, as it is in other descendents of their shared common ancestor. As for the omission in the editio princeps, Shaw repeats Pier Giorgio Ricci's argument that the sixteenth-century editor suppressed it in order to match his assertions in the Epistola Dedicatoria that the author of the work is not in fact the author of the Commedia but a late Quattrocento philosopher. In light of this evidence it would be difficult to maintain the argument, which continues to be made by scholars who want to date the treatise to before the Commedia, that a scribe familiar with the Paradiso might have introduced the phrase.
By providing all of these materials, the edition allows for the rapid resolution of that familiar oscillation between trust and suspicion that accompanies any use of a critical edition. One can see the Monarchiatranscribed in different hands and, thanks to the manuscript descriptions, consider its placement in various codicological contexts. Although I would have liked somewhat more detailed and consistent descriptions of the witnesses and images of the full contents of the manuscripts rather than just the pages containing the Monarchia, I can only lament their absence because the edition as a whole shows how much is now possible in a digital edition. A printed edition may contain a handful of reproductions of single folios from various manuscripts, if the publisher can be persuaded to include them, but this digital edition provides images of every page and scholars can use them to pose questions about paleography or mise-en-page, for example, that might not concern the textual editor. For those interested in exploring further the textual critical issues of the work, the edition includes a "variant map" which allows one to compare a particular variant between families.
This edition will be a valuable resource for Dante scholars and historians of political thought but-one must ask-for how long? Some glitches in the interface, like the frequency with which the navigation menu failed to appear and the inability to access some images, like those of the Budapest manuscript, remind users that the very technology which preserves these materials is quickly becoming outdated, as the DVD goes the way of the floppy disk. Hopefully, the promised internet subscription and future iterations of the edition can resolve some of these issues of usability and sustainability by making it available online. At the same time that the digital edition shows the remarkable advantages of going beyond the codex, it remains hobbled by the usual difficulties of reading on a computer screen. It is not easy to read the 35 pages of Shaw's introduction even on a large monitor, but her presentation of the editorial tradition and her own methodology is well worth printing out because it is so clear. Indeed, impressive as this DVD-ROM is, most people will still want a paper reading-text. The digital edition is ultimately an extraordinary supplement to, rather than a replacement for, Shaw's 1995 edition with English translation published by Cambridge University Press.
Every critical edition may only be an ipotesi di lavoro, or working hypothesis, as Gianfranco Contini once noted in an observation quoted by Shaw at the beginning of her introduction, but this digital edition goes further than any printed edition can in allowing scholars to test its hypotheses, formulate their own, and pose other questions of the textual tradition for different kinds of research, both historical and hermeneutic. The relatively restricted scope of the Monachia's tradition may have facilitated the collection of the materials for this edition but it can still serve as a model for larger editorial projects at the same time that it should encourage further research into the history of Dante's key work of political theory.