Nuove Prospettive sulla Tradizione della “Commedia.” Terza Serie (2020)
Martina Cita, Federico Marchetti, and Paolo Trovato, eds.
Padua: libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni, 2021. 221 pp. €19.90.
As the current issue of Bibliotheca Dantesca comes out, the first two volumes (Introduction and Inferno) of the new critical edition of Dante’s Comedy, edited by the so-called Gruppo di Ferrara, should already have been or will soon be released. Their publication marks a turning point in the editorial history of the Comedy, and in textual philology and criticism in general. Conducted on ca. 630 loci critici and more than 580 witnesses, the collation carried out by the Gruppo di Ferrara, led by Paolo Trovato, is a truly remarkable endeavor that no Dante scholar nor textual critic will be able to ignore. Nuove Prospettive offers us a glimpse into their workshop, shedding light on the problems they faced, as well as on their methodology and some preliminary results.
Nuove Prospettive is the proceeding of an online symposium held in June 2020, in which the Gruppo di Ferrara confronted a selected group of Dante scholars and philologists in preparation of the new edition of the Comedy. The first part of the volume, “Qualche altra idea su Dante,” features seven essays presented by the members of the Gruppo. The second part, “Note e commenti,” is a collection of objections, observations, and further considerations from the discussants invited to the conference.
The essay by Luisa Ferretti Cuomo, who is charge of the new edition’s commentary, opens the volume. It is a highly enjoyable, insightful, and informative collection of five case studies that show what the lexicological challenges of glossing the Comedy are and what tools should be used to reconstruct the history and meaning of problematic terms. In the following essay, Elisabetta Tonello shares some considerations about the contaminations of the manuscripts belonging to the periferia stemmatica (“…the witnesses that cannot be linked to neither big nor small families,”[1] p. 23) of the Tuscan-Florentine tradition of the Comedy. Tonello provides detailed tables that summarize her findings. She takes into consideration both contaminations of readings, “when the copyist chooses case by case, line by line, from two or more models simultaneously present on their desk,” or contamination of exemplars, “when the models alternate regularly” (p. 25). She also identifies and investigates a third kind of contamination, which she terms “hybrid,” that is a combination of the other two. Her contribution is of great importance for anyone interested in the slippery topic of contamination.
The following two essays, by Fabio Romanini and Marco Giola, offer some preliminary considerations on the future editions of Purgatorio and Paradiso, respectively. Romanini looks at the 15 loci critici from Purg. 2 (8 taken from Barbi, 4 from Petrocchi, and 3 selected by the Gruppo di Ferrara, p. 39). The Gruppo famously identified the codices of the β branch of the stemma, Florio (Udine, Università degli Studi di Udine, Bibl. Florio, 001) and Urbinate (Vatican City, Bibl. Apost. Vaticana, Urb. Lat. 366), as two of the most authoritative witnesses of the entire tradition and underscored the close affinity between the two. Not surprisingly, then, Romanini concludes that “also in this canto, the agreement between Florio and Urbinate is extremely high” (p. 45). He also argues that “the families previously identified are solid” and suggests that they also show striking graphic similarities (p. 45). Giola combines a study of the variants, and of Dante’s previous works and sources to offer an interpretation of 5 case studies (6 loci critici) from Par. 15. His contribution is useful both in terms of methodology and for his multilayered approach.
Martina Cita and Elena Niccolai’s contributions are specific to Inferno and the authors most likely relied on a critical edition which was at an extremely advanced stage. I believe these essays to be the most interesting of the volume. Cita offers a remarkably clear exposition on the fiorentinismi of the family β (U and F in the stemma ferrarese), the sub-archetype of reference of the edition. Such an assessment is paramount, for U and F are northern witnesses and their degree of “florentinness” could hypothetically be evidence of authenticity. Niccolai in turn assesses the “new prosody of Inferno according to β.” Her essay offers a detailed account of the prosodic features of Inferno based on about 20 cantos of the edition (p. 88). Niccolai compares the prosody of β’s Inferno with that of the Sicilian poets, concluding that they are in conversation (p. 127). She also demonstrates how β allows for the drastic reduction in the number of exceptions to the predominant prosodic practices of the text. That I know of, this is the first critical edition whose results are specifically assessed through the verification of prosody, which attests to the intelligence and rigor of the entire operation.
In the last contribution of the first part of the volume, Paolo Trovato shares some reflections on the punctuation of some of the codices. Many considerations are fascinating: for instance, the idea that in Triv. (Milano, Bibl. Trivulziana, 1080), the virgula might signal words accented on the final syllable and accented monosyllables (p. 133). Nevertheless, what is most striking, especially considering some of the previous essays, are once again the similarities between U and F, which he extends to the archetype β0. Trovato points out how the punctuation of U is not “less sophisticated than the autograph section of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,” suggesting that β0 might transmit traces of Dante’s own punctuation practices (pp. 148 ff.).
The second part of the volume gathers the contributions of some of the discussants: Luciano Formisano, Giovanna Frosini, Laura Facini and Arnaldo Soldani, Rosario Coluccia, Sandro Bertelli, Mirko Tavoni, Tiziano Zanato, and Lorenzo Renzi. Their observations contain, more often than not, some critical objections. And quite frankly, it would be surprising if an operation such as the one carried out by the Gruppo di Ferrara had raised no perplexities: they will, after all, restore a version of the Comedy (that is, a text that almost every Italian and many international readers know intimately well) to which our ears are not accustomed. This volume is a must read for anyone planning to evaluate their new Comedy. It documents the rigor, spirit of collaboration (among the members of the group as well as with the rest of the community of Dante scholars and philologists), and methodological innovations that made the experience of the Gruppo di Ferrara the most interesting philological workshop on the Comedy in our time.
Paolo Scartoni, Rutgers University
All translations are mine. ↑