Materiality and Textuality: Editing and Rewriting the Lyric Dante in History

The paper presents the MaTeLDa project (Materiality and Textuality: Editing and Rewriting the Lyric Dante in History, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2018-2020), which offers an interdisciplinary study of how Dante was received and ‘canonized’ in late medieval and early modern Italy. MaTeLDa envisages the analysis of a selection of Dante’s texts in material contexts, and of specific instances of the circulation and reception of his lyric poetry, thereby laying the basis for a better understanding of medieval and early modern authoriality; the qualities of books as ‘textual objects’; and the ways in which context, form, and annotation in single books may bestow cultural authority upon authors and works. The essay then investigates a case-study in order to illustrate some key aspects of the circulation of Dante’s lyric poetry and the construction of his figure as an Author between the thirteenth and the late fourteenth century: the peculiar case of the transmission of Dante’s experimental canzone in three languages (French, Latin, and Italian) “Aï faus ris.”

Keywords: Dante, Lyric Poetry, Cultural Authority, Manuscript, Medieval Italian Literature