L’oro dei Santi: Percorsi della “Legenda Aurea” in volgare.
Speranza Cerullo and Laura Ingallinella, eds.
Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo per la fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2023. 462 pp. €62.00.
As any scholar of philology knows, producing a critical edition is a demanding undertaking that requires extensive preparation and persistence. This is especially true when the subject is a text of great codicological and philological complexity such as the Legenda Aurea and its various translations.
This volume, edited by Speranza Cerullo and Laura Ingallinella, brings together studies devoted to the Legenda Aurea, with particular attention to the preparatory work for the critical edition of its Florentine vernacular version within the “Legenda Aurea in Italiano” project. This represents the oldest and most complete translation of the work authored by the Dominican friar Iacopo da Varazze (also known as Jacobus of Varagine), who compiled his Latin collection of hagiographies in the thirteenth century. The Legenda Aurea quickly achieved wide popularity and, like many significant texts of the period, was translated into numerous vernaculars over the following centuries.
This volume is structured in four sections. The first describes the Latin text of the Legenda Aurea, with contributions by Maggioni and Degl’Innocenti. Maggioni explores the Tuscan Latin manuscripts of the Legenda and their potential relationship with the Florentine translations; Degl’Innocenti examines other Tuscan legendari (often-anonymous collections of hagiographies). The second section discusses the Legenda Aurea in Italy from multiple perspectives. Speranza Cerullo, one of the two editors, provides an excellent overview of the Italian translations of the Legenda Aurea and stresses that only seven manuscripts contain complete translations of the text. By contrast, Domenico Cavalca’s Vite dei santi padri, a text similar in scope, survives in more than twenty complete manuscripts, with many more containing only partial versions. Individual hagiographies, however, prove more successful, appearing frequently in vernacular miscellanies. This suggests that the Legenda functioned primarily as a source for single legends and, at times, even for isolated episodes extracted for exemplary purposes. The material evidence corroborates this pattern: most surviving witnesses of these Italian translations are of modest quality and lack decoration, suggesting that scribes produced them for non-elite readers. Essays by Colombo and Pagano discuss Genoese and Sicilian translations of the Legenda Aurea respectively, demonstrating the collection’s local importance across the Italian peninsula.
The third section focuses on the Florentine tradition of the Legenda Aurea and its forthcoming critical edition, which is based on three key manuscripts: Ricc. 1254 of the Riccardiana Library in Florence, Ms. Canon. Ital. 267 of the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, and Giaccherino I.F.2 of the Biblioteca Provinciale dei Frati Minori in Florence. This section addresses the project “Legenda Aurea in Italiano,” which Lino Leonardi had introduced at the beginning of the volume and which has occupied multiple scholars (including Leonardi and Cerullo) for over twenty years. The contributions here offer a coherent and nuanced understanding of how this Florentine vernacularization works. Ingallinella traces the various hands that copied or studied this text, from the earliest copyists of this Florentine tradition to later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers who approached it with linguistic and antiquarian interests, after its devotional context had lost its cultural appeal. She devotes particular attention to Arrigo Levasti, editor of the only published edition of the Florentine vernacularization, which is based exclusively on Ricc. 1254. Ingallinella discusses Levasti’s background, intellectual milieu, and editorial approach, noting that while the edition requires a more philologically rigorous approach, it retains the merit of bringing an important Italian witness of the Legenda Aurea into print. This section of the book concludes with three focused studies: a study on the Giaccherino manuscript (Verlato), an analysis of the text’s lexicon (Dotto), and an examination of its syntax (Tagliani). Together, these contributions illustrate some of the methodological approaches informing the new critical edition.
The fourth and final section of the volume examines the Legenda Aurea across Romance-speaking Europe, particularly France, Spain, and other linguistic traditions. Four contributions (by Cigni, Veysseye, Gesiot and Zinelli, and Sacchi) expand the scope of the volume and highlight the complexity of studying the Legenda Aurea’s transmission and reception beyond Italy.
Ultimately, L’oro dei santi is a well-conceived and skillfully executed volume that illuminates the current state of research on the Legenda Aurea and its traditions in Italy and across Romance Europe. The volume clearly maps the field as it now stands and, more importantly, anticipates the forthcoming critical edition of the Florentine vernacularization of Varazze’s collection. This edition represents a necessary and eagerly awaited contribution, one that will enable scholars and readers to better understand the cultural reception of a text that enriched late medieval Italian literature and continued to shape literary and devotional traditions well beyond its original audience.
Mario Sassi