Laura Banella.
Rime e libri delle rime di Dante tra Medioevo e primo Rinascimento.
Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020. 211 pp. €28.

Only relatively recently has the material turn begun to attract attention of Dante scholars in America, as the currents of “new philology” and book history have begun to reshape Dante Studies in the last two decades. In the Italian academy, however, the material reality of the book has never been absent from the study of medieval culture, thanks to a continuous emphasis on ecdotics. In Rime e libri delle rime di Dante tra medioevo e primo rinascimento, Laura Banella brings together three studies on Dante’s lyric poetry that combine these different visions of philology, offering a compelling vision of Dante, his textual reception, and his status as an author and vernacular lyric poet, from the years following his death up to the mid-fifteenth century.

In the first of these three studies, “Aï faus ris: Dante tra sperimentalismo e canone”, Banella investigates the representation of Dante as vernacular poet by examining a text that the manuscript record frequently either associates with Petrarch or leaves unattributed: the trilingual canzone “Aï faus ris”, that alternates between Italian, French, and Latin. Building on the work of Furio Brugnolo and Domenico De Robertis, Banella argues in favor of the text’s attribution to Dante by examining a range of manuscripts from the fourteenth century onwards. This first study offers an innovative formulation of Dante as author: Banella successfully brings Foucault’s notion of the author as a stylistic unity into dialogue with the experience of reading the manuscript anthology, with its many contingencies. In so doing, Banella demonstrates that the process of ordering and selecting texts within an anthology produces competing visions of poets and their corpora, including Dante. As a multilingual text, “Aï faus ris” does not conform to the stylistic expectations placed on Dante’s corpus, yet Banella sees this as an experimental move on Dante’s part to surpass the division of Latin and the vernacular. The chapter traces the increasing association of the canzone with Dante from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries: the earliest witnesses of “Aï faus ris” do not ascribe the text to him, yet, by the end of the fifteenth century, things had changed. The 1491 printing of the Landino commentary to the Commedia includes “Aï faus ris” in a section dedicated to Dante’s Canzoni, along with the 15 canzoni distese, and two others from the Vita Nuova, while the Giuntina closes book II with this multilingual text. The attribution of “Aï faus ris” aside, Banella foregrounds an understudied multi-lingual lyric text that troubles the assumed preference for Petrarch and his lexically restrained, “monolingual” style in anthologies of the Trecento and Quattrocento.

The second of the book’s studies investigates a little-known figure in the history of Italian lyric: Andrea Stefani. Associated with both the popular devotional movement of the “bianchi”, and the Florentine Ars Nova, Stefani’s anthology provides Banella the opportunity to reflect not only on the material transmission of early Italian lyric texts but hypothesize about the connection between music and lyric in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Banella uses Andrea to demonstrate a shift in the compilation of Dante’s lyric around this time. In his lyric anthology, Andrea compiles his own output next to that of Petrarch, giving him pride of place at the opening of the volume; Banella, however, sees Dante as Andrea’s primary stylistic influence, with “Aï faus ris” appearing at the beginning of the sequence of Dante’s canzoni. In Andrea’s “Allo specchio pulita”, Banella identifies a rewriting of Dante’s lyric texts, including “I’ mi son pargoletta” and “Così nel mio parlar”. Banella makes a strong case for the influence of Dante’s rime petrose over a poet associated with the Ars Nova movement, opening an avenue for further study that would be well supported by the appendix included with this chapter, in which Banella transcribes, edits and comments upon Andrea’s lyric texts found in Marucelliano C 152.

In the book’s final chapter, “Padova, Dante lirico e l’alba del Rinascimento”, Banella assesses the reception of both Dante and Petrarch in the Veneto. Banella traces the reception of Dante’s lyric poetry through anthologies created by notable readers: Nicolò de’ Rossi, Giovanni Quirini, and Sicco Polenton. Nicolò and Giovanni, both poets themselves, anthologized Tuscan poetry and appeared to model their style on the work of Dante and his contemporaries, yet their knowledge of Dante’s work was likely incomplete. Banella observes that the selective transmission of Dante’s corpus in the Veneto produces a partial vision of him as a poet and author: for instance, while Dante’s Commedia appears to have been widely known in the region during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, his Convivio seems to have fared less well outside of Florence. For Banella, this variation in the compilation of Dante’s works proves productive: Nicolò’s “portrait” of Dante offers a vision of his lyric output that does not follow the selections made by Boccaccio, creating instead a version of Dante the lyric poet who works across all registers. This chapter emphasizes that the humanist literary culture of the late fourteenth-century Veneto did not neatly separate lyric output by register, nor did it devote anthologies to a single genre, with Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia compiled with Mussato’s Ecerinis in Biblioteca Trivulziana, 1088. In the Veneto, both Dante’s vernacular and Latin works were compiled with those of authors now identified as “humanist”. Even into the fifteenth century, Banella interprets Venetan anthologies as creating continuity between the early phases of Italian lyric, exemplified by Dante, and Petrarch’s later stylistic innovations.

Given the centrality of the multi-lingual “Aï faus ris” to its argument, Rime e libri delle rime di Dante could have attempted a more sustained engagement with texts and anthologies written in vernaculars other than Italian; yet, Banella clearly defines the scope of the work by focusing on the reception of two of Italian literature’s three crowns. The book synthesizes the reception history of both Dante and Petrarch’s lyric texts, nuancing the narrative of Petrarch and Petrarchism as the dominant lyric model in Renaissance Italy. The professional and political classes of Venice and the Veneto who anthologized Latin and vernacular texts, interweaving classicizing, humanistic works with the history of Italian vernacular lyric, ensured that Dante’s lyric poetry did not disappear in Petrarch’s long shadow, but rather remained associated with his fellow exile’s lyric output, in what Banella describes as a dialectic relationship. Banella’s command of the volume’s sizeable corpus of manuscripts and early printed books, which spans 200 years of bookmaking, produces a monograph that crosses the boundaries of conventional periodization, and offers a notable new contribution to the history of the book in Dante Studies.

Katherine Travers, Durham University