“I am really glad to have participated in this project and played a role in highlighting the role of women who might have otherwise gone under appreciated. This project is crucial for increasing the accessibility of information and will no doubt make research and study easier for many people, helping to shape our understanding of Dante and his works. 

It was particularly rewarding to be able to add information to the biographies through independent research, transforming small paragraphs into in-depth stories of these women’s lives. This was not without its challenges as the contemporary sources which I did find used language which is not as accessible as modern Italian, which needed to be adapted to suit the needs of the target audience. Of course, contemporary sources were not available for many of the women whose biographies are featured, but my hope is that with time, more sources will be uncovered, allowing for more biographies to be translated and for these women’s stories to be better told. 

 I am also grateful that, in a time of growing reliance on IA translation, human translators were called on to accomplish this task which, to me, was also about humanising people who are often thought of as historical artefacts, rather than real people with real lives.”

Carmen Brown-Henandenz (University of Bristol)