 The journey of the mind to knowledge. The exploration of the bright and the dark sides of the human nature. The longing for home of the exile. Welcome to the British Library. Today we'd like to take you on a tour of our Dante collections. Born in 1265 in Florence, Italy, Dante Eligieri, poet, politician and philosopher, was exiled in 1302 and lived a wandering existence through Italian teleceptual di Ravenna, where he died in 1321, 700 years ago. His main work is the Divine Comedy. His account of a journey through the three realms of hell, purgatory and heaven. Dante is considered national poet in Italy, but is much more than that. The earliest manuscripts of the Divine Comedy appear almost immediately after Dante completed the poem in 1320. There are hundreds of copies that survived from the 14th and 15th centuries, and they're often decorated and sometimes extremely extensively. Here I have in front of me one of the earliest Dante manuscripts in our collection. It was made in northeast Italy in around 1340, so only a couple of decades after the poem was completed. It contains 261 small miniatures depicting events from the text. For the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, all books were written and decorated entirely by hand. This meant that they were extremely rare and valuable. Despite this, there was a huge manuscript tradition of copies of Dante's Divine Comedy. In this miniature you can see Dante and Virgil in the second circle of hell, witnessing the whirlwind of the lustful. On the left you can see Dante and Virgil, and on the right you can see the whirlwind of lovers. Another good example is this miniature in which we can see Virgil and Dante witnessing the treacherous imprisoned in a lake of ice. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Divine Comedy is because it was written in Italian rather than Latin, which was the language that a lot of literature was written in at the time. This meant that a lot more people could read it. What I'm looking at here is our copy of a very first printed edition in Italy in 1472, just eight years after the new technology of printing was introduced into Italy. It doesn't really have a title page. It begins with the text, but it tells you that it's starting. It says the Comedy of Dante Allegheri of Florence begins here, and so it does. And then it just continues. There are no illustrations and there's no commentary. A scribe would tell you that he'd finished writing the manuscript at the end, and printers did exactly the same. The amusing thing here is that the printer gives his name, he gives the date, and he tells you where he printed it, but he's copied the rhyming scheme of the poem itself. As I say, he names himself Io Maestro Johanni Nummeister, Johann Neumeister, John Neumeister, a German name, and that was very characteristic of early printing in Italy. The first printers in Italy were almost all Germans who brought the new technology into Italy. In 1900, renowned publisher Rallinari gave young artists the opportunity to participate in a competition to illustrate Dante's work. The outcome is this edition that I have in front of me. This image from Inferno by D'Uilio Cambellotti describes scenes where the heretics are being punished. It's in the Liberty style. And the second one is from Alberto Martini, an artist very young who critics said was born to illustrate Dante because of this almost symbolist taste very inspired by artists such as Odilo Redone and Aubrey Beardsley. I hope you've enjoyed our short tour. There's a lot more in our collections. Our work at the British Library is to preserve these treasures for future generations and to continue acquiring more. In English, in Italian, and in many other languages. If you'd like to find out more about our Dante collections, why don't you search our online catalogue view our digitized manuscripts or come to our reading rooms.