American Dante Bibliography

Bibliografia Dantesca Internazionale / International Dante Bibliography

In March 2017, the Dante Society of America entered into a formal partnership with the Società Dantesca Italiana (SDI) to collaborate in the production of a new, bilingual version of the Bibliografia Dantesca Internazionale / International Dante Bibliography, with enhanced search capabilities. The new version was launched in Fall 2017. The richest online bibliography for Dante Studies, it currently contains roughly 30,000 entries. Entries for publications published in North America are prepared by graduate students affiliated with the Dante Society of America, under the guidance of the Society's Bibliography Committee. We also publish the yearly American Dante Bibliography as a separate resource on our website. 

Explore the bilingual International Dante Bibliography

  • Click the button above or go to https://bibliografia.dantesca.it.
  • Click the EN icon in the upper right to display the search interface in English
  • Be sure to click the "play" (right arrow) button to initiate your search. Pressing "enter" or return on your keyboard will not start the search.

On March 23, 2017, Presidents Marcello Ciccuto of the Società Dantesca Italiana (SDI) and Albert Russell Ascoli of the Dante Society of America (DSA) signed a path-breaking Partnership Agreement for collaboration of the two Societies in the production of a new, bilingual version of the Bibliografia Dantesca Internazionale/International Dante Bibliography, with enhanced search capabilities. Henceforth, this powerful bibliographical instrument will integrate the materials published in the DSA’s annual American Dante Bibliography, which will also continue to appear separately on the DSA website.

The partnership is the result of a year of constructive negotiations between the Societies and serious discussions within their respective governing bodies. The DSA gratefully acknowledges the special contributions made by Professor Elisa Brilli of the University of Toronto, and newly appointed Liaison of the DSA to the SDI, during this process. The new collaborative bibliographical platform described below will go live before the end of 2017, perhaps as early as September, and will be freely accessible to members of the DSA and in fact to all scholars and students of Dante. A further announcement will be made at the time of the launch.

Among the most important features of this joint bibliographic venture are the following:

  • free access online for all DSA members to the enhanced Bibliografia Dantesca Internazionale/International Dante Bibliography, incorporating from now on all the new bibliographical information that in the past had been published annually in the American Dante Bibliography;
  • a fully bilingual (English and Italian) interface for the collaborative International Dante Bibliography;
  • an advanced search function in the collaborative International Dante Bibliography that allows searching by subject and topic, as well as by author and title, and permits users to select records of particular interest and download them (features that have not been available to users of the free-standing American Dante Bibliography);
  • a separately published version of the American Dante Bibliography, through the DSA website, that will contain North American materials only, thus conserving our tradition of signaling the contributions of American dantisti to international Dante Studies.

As a result, North American contributions to the study of Dante will have significantly increased international visibility, while members and friends of the DSA will have easy, English-language access to publications produced in Italy and throughout the world.

Both Societies conceive this partnership as the beginning of a renewed phase of collaboration to foster productive exchanges between North American and European scholars and students of Dante.

The bibliographical activities of the DSA were initially supervised by a committee of four individuals appointed by the President:

  • Alison Cornish, DSA Bibliographer and Committee Chair
  • Elisa Brilli, Coordinator of the implementation of the new Partnership, and DSA Liaison to the SDI
  • Danielle Callegari, Compiler of the American Dante Bibliography for 2015
  • Christian Dupont, Secretary-Librarian of the DSA (ex officio)

Entries for publications published in North America are now prepared by graduate students affiliated with the Dante Society of America, under the guidance of the Society's Bibliography Committee. Recommendations for publications to be included should be sent to the Society's Secretary at [email protected].

From 1953 through 2014, an annual bibliography of American Dante Studies was published as an appendix to Dante Studies, the annual journal of the Dante Society. Since 2015, the annual bibliography has been published exclusively online via this website. As a convenience to our members and other scholars, freely downloadable PDF and Microsoft Word versions of the contents of these annual bibliographies are presented below, along with browsable HTML versions. We are grateful to former Dante Studies editor Richard Lansing for preparing electronic versions of the annual bibliographies and to Dominic Ferrante for mounting them on this website. In the process, addenda to the listings that appeared in Dante Studies were incorporated with their corresponding years and all formatting made consistent.

Up through and including 2015, the American Dante bibliographies include all publications relating to Dante (books, articles, translations, reviews) written by North American writers or published in North America for the calendar year, as well as reviews of books from elsewhere published in the United States and Canada.

Beginning in 2016, the scope of was modified to include all publications relating to Dante published in North America, including reviews published in North American journals of books published elsewhere (i.e., the criteria for inclusion are now based on publisher location rather than author origin or residency). Since 2016, all of the entries in American Dante Bibliography are also included in the Bibliografia Dantesca Internazionale/International Dante Bibliography (in fact, the ADB is now prepared as an extract from the BDI/IDB). The BDI/IDB also includes most entries from earlier American Dante bibliographies, and more are being added retrospectively on an ongoing basis. Nevertheless, to ensure a complete search of North American publications, users are encouraged to search both the BDI/IDB and the American Dante Bibliographies By Year listed below.

Please send notices of any corrections or omissions to [email protected].