I’m pretty sure Dante Alighieri was not writing fanfiction, but was in fact creating a satirical work, as he wrote this during his years of being Excommunicated. Which is also part of The reason it’s referred to as The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia). He was excommunicated for false political crimes.

Also Dante’s Inferno was also a proof of concept for what became the modern Italian language.

( though if you’re saying fan fiction sarcastically I do agree)

So much effort?

You do realize the movable type printing press was invented by Gutenberg and initially used to reproduce the bible right?

So yeah... a lot of effort was most definitely put into bringing the Bible to the general masses.

Isn’t it the second most mass produced book in the world?

After a certain point, the automation makes making more of them effortless.

That's kind of the point of the invention... to reproduce it at scale so it would be cheaper and everyone could read it instead of relying on the clergy to interpret for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible