One year earlier, a similar group had come together in Oxford, with scholar Edward Moore at its helm, but it was Longfellow who first brought the Americans Lowell and Norton together at Craigie House to discuss Dante.

Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the society has always been closely associated with Harvard University, due in no small part to the lasting influence of these three professors.

Twenty-two years later, he would resign his chair at Harvard to accept the appointment of United States Minister to Spain and pass the course on to Norton, a history of art professor.

So the thirteenth century lived for him not merely in its poetry, theology, and chronicles, but in paintings and statues in its churches and town halls, and its palaces and dwellings ... he could compass the whole circle of experience and the ideals of that world of which the Divine Comedy is the supreme expression in language.

These might have been supplemented by Cesare Balbo's Vita di Dante, or some of Ugo Foscolo's essays, but it was under the direction of William Coolidge Lane, an assistant librarian at the Harvard College Library and member of the Society, that an extensive scholarly collection began to take shape.

An 1890 catalog of the collection compiled by Lane and issued by the Harvard Library listed over 1200 volumes on Dante, including over three hundred different editions of the Divine Comedy.

The first annual report of the Society listed Miss S. L. Butler, Mrs. C. Dupee, Heloise Durant, Mrs. S. A. Gordon, Fannie L. Payson, and Mrs. A. L. Wister as founding members.