Unlocking Poliphilo’s Dream: Towards a digital scholarly edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Abstract: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a fifteenth-century illustrated incunabulum first published in 1499 by Aldo Manuzio in Venice. It delivers the story of two lovers separated by death but united in a dream; in fact, the entire book is a complex, multi-layered dream narrative which gradually unfolds through the interaction between text and image, inviting readers to engage with its rich content in a playful manner. The envisioned “Digital Hypnerotomachia Project" (DHP) aspires to create a platform where the encoded transcriptions and facsimiles of the various early printed editions of this literary work can be comparatively viewed and where users can interact with the text by clicking on annotated words, phrases, or images that lead to associations within, between, and outside the texts; and, ultimately, where users can generate their own annotations and share them with the community of readers. The most important features of such an edition would be, in my opinion, the annotations and tags, that will become the stepping stones towards a better and deeper understanding of the texts, their socio-cultural and literary contexts, and their intertextual relationship, hopefully opening up new pathways for research.  My thesis aims at the creation of a prototype edition, for which I will focus on the first chapter of the book. The aim is to create a parallel edition that will include some of the paratexts and first chapters of the original Italian Aldine edition, the two sixteenth-century French translations, and the sixteenth-century English translation. The omissions, additions, and changes in the early modern translations of the Hypnerotomachia can be quite revealing about the ways in which the text (and its images) was received, interpreted and adapted by early modern learned audiences. Regarding the editorial process, I will move gradually from digitization and transcription to TEI:XML encoding and publication, that is, the development of a user interface, but this will not necessarily be a linear progress, as constant re-evaluation will probably lead to adjustments and reiterations. The most important stage in the editorial process will be the TEI:XML encoding, which I perceive to be an interpretative process. The resulting annotated parallel edition prototype will hopefully show the potential of this type of edition for the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and its translations, and this pilot project may demonstrate its merits for critical comparative analyses of the work in research and in education.