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Edgar Allan Poe was a famous American poet, short story writer, journalist, and literary critic who lived from 1809-1849. He was born in Boston on January 19th, 1809 and was orphaned at an early age, after which he was sent to live with a foster family (The Allans) in Richmond. He was never officially adopted by the Allans and he was eventually disowned by the family.



Poe won a short story contest in 1833, and two years later became a literary critic for the magazine (The Southern Literary Messenger). Shortly after, he then married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia in 1836. He became nationally famous upon the publication of his poem The Raven in 1845.



His life was marred by infrequent but intense drinking bouts which gave him a bad reputation. However, he continued to produce excellent short stories (Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold Bug) which brought him acclaim in America, England, and especially in France. Many of Poe's stories take place in Paris. (The French poet Baudelaire translated many of Poe's works)



Unfortunately, after the death of Poe's wife (1847), he fell apart and died two years later on October 7, 1849. Poe's controversial life and reputation have earned him the following comments no less:



With the aid of his psychological stories, critics have proclaimed him necrophilic, dipsomanic, paranoid, impotent, neurotic, oversexed, a habitual taker of drugs, until all that is left in the public eye is an unstable creature sitting gloomily in a dim room, the raven over the door, the bottle on the table, the opium in the pipe, scribbling mad verses.

The Florentine mathematician and architect Antonio Manetti (1423-1497) is generally considered the founder of the study of Dantean cosmography, and is particularly noted for his investigations into the site, shape and size of Dante's Hell. Although Manetti never himself published his research regarding the topic, the earliest Renaissance Florentine editors of the poem, Cristoforo Landino and Girolamo Benivieni, reported the results of his researches in their respective editions of the Divine Comedy (1481, Florence: Nicolo di Lorenzo della Magna; 1506, Florence: Filippo Giunti).



The Benivieni edition, also known as the Giuntina, features two dialogues in which Manetti's theories were expounded. It included for the first time a series of woodcuts specifically intended to illustrate Dante's cosmography and in particular, the structure of Dante's Hell ( a, b, c, d, e, f, g). These woodcuts from the Giuntina edition of the poem represent the beginnings of an iconographical tradition treating Dante's cosmography and infernal geography which continues to this day in scholastic editions of the poem.



The Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius' second edition of the Divine Comedy in 1515 followed the example of the Giuntina by presenting a cross-section of the inverted cone of Hell, complete with calculations of infernal mileage derived from Manetti's theories. Aldus' edition also included another chart presenting a moral schema (a, b) of Lower Hell which has been recently attributed to the Venetian humanist and editor of Dante's poem Pietro Bembo. Bernardino Daniello's edition of the Divine Comedy with commentary (1568, Venice: Pietro da Fino) presented yet another striking and original illustration of Dante's infernal realm.



The study of Dantean cosmography was a primarily Florentine or Tuscan preoccupation throughout the Renaissance. Even the young Galileo Galilei delivered two lectures to the Florentine Academy during the winter of 1587-88 in which he defended Manetti's opinions against challenges to the Florentine's views offered in the commentary by Alessandro Vellutello (1544, Venice: Marcolini). Vellutello had provided his own series of illustrations(a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i). In the scholarly 1595 edition of the Divine Comedy prepared by the Florentine linguistic academy, Accademia della Crusca, the editors did not fail to include a geometrical engraving of Hell's design and dimensions inspired by the Florentine Antonio Manetti's theories.