Notes on the British Contribution to the Nineteenth-Century Rise of Dante Studies: Edward Moore and the Text of the Commedia

Much has been written on Dante's reception in Britain and his influence on British writers. Little attention, on the other hand, has been given to the British contribution to the emergence of Dante studies as a critical discipline in the nineteenth century — within an international Dante cult inspired by Romantic medievalism and notions of creative genius, by Risorgimento nationalism in Italy (and di riflesso in countries, like Britain, sympathetic to the cause of Italian unity and independence), and again, here in Britain, by a major religious revival.