Il Dante di Boccaccio. Atti del Convegno, Certaldo Alta, Casa di Giovanni Boccaccio (9-10 dicembre 2021).
Natascia Tonelli, ed.
Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2024 (Giovanni Boccaccio. Testi e Studi, 1). XII-276 pp. €35.00.

This volume inaugurates the “Giovanni Boccaccio. Testi e Studi” series, promoted by the Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio to host research on the authors works, biography, and library, as well as the proceedings of the conferences organized by the Ente, aiming at a new complete edition of his works, as stated by the series directors Maurizio Fiorilla and Giovanna Frosini. This first issue brings together the contributions presented at the conference Il Dante di Boccaccio (Certaldo Alta, December 9-10, 2021), which – as Natascia Tonelli notes in the Preface – focused on Boccaccio’s attempt to reconcile his two inner poles, respectively, Dante and Petrarch, and on his engagement with the Comedy.

As for the first point, Marco Veglia examines Boccaccio’s view of poetry in light of his friendship with Petrarca, focusing particularly on the rupture of 1353, which caused a crisis in his sense of identity between truth and poetry. In response, Boccaccio embraced a broader conception of poetry, whose credibility was grounded in the poet’s frugal and principled lifestyle – a stance that aligned him more closely with Dante. Carla Maria Monti, in turn, discusses Movit iam diu, the letter dated March 19, 1351, in which the city of Florence invited Petrarch to teach rhetoric and poetry at the Studium Florentinum. While some have considered it a collective work, Monti carefully reconstructs its textual tradition, historical context, structure, content, sources, stylistic and lexical choices, supporting Boccaccio’s exclusive authorship and highlighting how the letter reflects “l’ombra dell’esilio di Dante”. Monti examines parallels in content and vocabulary among the letter, Boccaccio’s poem Ytalie iam certus honos, and Dante’s Letter 12, particularly in connection with the themes of exile and poetic laureation; the scholar suggests that by recalling Petrarch to Florence, Boccaccio was attempting to make symbolic amends to Dante. The appendix provides the text of the Movit iam diu, based on the edition by Ginetta Auzzas (1992) and revised in form.

Two essays analyze in detail the presence of elements drawn from the Comedy in two Latin works by Boccaccio. Angelo Piacentini’s contribution takes its cue from Edoardo Fumagalli’s position, according to which the Buccolicum carmen marks the mature Boccaccio’s distancing from Dante. Fumagalli took Eclogue 14, Olympia, as his model, where Olimpia-Violante describes to Silvio-Boccaccio a paradise modeled on Virgil’s Elysium and, in his view, far removed from Dante’s. Piacentini then examines a series of Dantean images and narrative patterns used by Boccaccio, which – sometimes reworked with Alighieri’s sources and elements of liturgy and iconography – reveal a mature assimilation of the Comedy. Along the same lines, Roberta Morosini investigates the structural role of navigatio in the Genealogie and the Comedy. Boccaccio creates a cartography of poetry by situating myths in specific locations, adopting a similar scientific approach to Dante’s, drawing on the teachings of the astronomer Andalò del Negro. In Book 3, Boccaccio explains his epistemological, geo-cultural method: beginning with the place and tracing its history and origins. Geography lends veracity to both Dante’s poem and Boccaccio’s myths, as well as to the voyages of the two poet-sailors.

Dante’s emulation also involves criticism or reversal of his model: this is what emerges from the contributions of Philippe Guérin and Franziska Meier. The former demonstrates that behind the Corbaccio, there is not so much the Comedy, as is usually believed, but Dante’s Vita Nova, from which Boccaccio borrows formal, narrative, rhetorical, and ethical elements, sometimes analogically or parodically reworked. For Guérin, the purpose of this “intersituazionalità” is not pure trivialization, but a profound reflection on the powers of poetic language: Boccaccio condemns love based on purely literary reasons, therefore not the vernacular lyric poetry per se, but its inappropriate use. Meier, on the other hand, focuses on Boccaccio’s discomfort with Dante’s Beatrice. It emerges in the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia, in Boccaccio’s exposition on Canto II of Inferno, where the commentator sometimes presents her as an ideal, while other times as a young Florentine woman. The author of the paper interprets this oscillation as reflecting Boccaccio’s unease with Dante’s anthropomorphizing of heaven; for Boccaccio, the divine and earthly realms must remain separate.

The volume also highlights Boccaccio’s role as annotator and reader of Dante. Silvia Finazzi examines Boccaccio’s philological annotations in the margins of two (Ri and Chig) of his three autograph manuscripts of the Comedy concerning Paradiso XV 28-30, a passage whose interpretation was uncertain even for the ancient exegetes of the Comedy. The problem revolves around the double reading numquam / umquam and the semantic ambiguity of recludere (whether ‘to open’ or ‘to close again’) in the last verse of the terzina. Boccaccio corrects his text (bis numquam celi ianüa reclusa) proposing to replace the adverb numquam either with erit (both in Ri and Chig) or with inquam (only in Chig). Both variants are the result of a philological intervention ope ingenii: the first arises from grammatical reasoning, while the second is a conjecture based on paleographic evidence. Sabrina Ferrara, on the other hand, explores the macro- and micro-structural organization of the Lectura Dantis, using Canto III of the Inferno as a case study. Her analysis shows a preference for a literal reading of the text and limited attention to rhetorical or stylistic features, which suggests that the work was not exclusively meant to a scholarly audience; a moralizing approach, in line with the requests of the Florentine municipality; a tendency toward narrativization in the excursus, where Boccaccio asserts his authorial voice; while the presence of contradictions and errors is attributable to the unfinished state of the work.

The volume merits recognition for going beyond a rigid periodization of Boccaccio’s biography and literary production. Its starting point is always a careful analysis of his writings, conducted by leading scholars in the field, whose contributions, despite their thematic heterogeneity, converge in demonstrating the enduring influence of Dante on Boccaccio’s thought, literary production, language, and civic activity, even after Boccaccio’s meeting with Francesco Petrarca had taken place. At the end of the volume, two comprehensive indexes – of names and of witnesses – edited by Enrico Moretti, further help readers navigate the essays.

Giorgia Paparelli, Università di Macerata