La filologia in Italia nel Rinascimento.
Carlo Caruso and Emilio Russo, eds.
Biblioteca dell’Arcadia. Studi e testi 4. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2018. XXIV + 424 pp. €58.
The volume is comprised of twenty-one chapters dealing with the textual and editorial trajectories of both Renaissance and pre-Renaissance literature in the Italian vernacular over a period of almost two centuries, approximately from the late Quattrocento to the mid-seventeenth century. As suggested by the editors in their introductory remarks (Carlo Caruso and Emilio Russo, ‘Introduzione,’ p. vii), the historical transition from “l’età del manoscritto” to “l’età della stampa” provides the main vantage point from which this variegated collection of essays may be regarded as a whole, although the introduction of typographical innovations (including new punctuation and formats, cursive and roman types) as well as paratextual devices (such as final indexes and appendices) hardly accounts for all the questions addressed throughout the volume.
To begin with, a crucial question arises about the literary canon and its making. This is not just a recurring topic but one across the board, which intersects the multifaceted scholarship devoted to what was known as “le Tre Corone” (i.e. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio). A contribution by Oscar Schiavone (‘Luca Martini filologo dantesco: collazioni, annotazioni e committenze (1543-1551),’ pp. 117-132) focuses, for example, on the work carried on in the years 1546-1548 by Luca Martini, Benedetto Varchi, and other (still unidentified) fellow scholars on the text of Dante’s Commedia, which they scrutinized by comparing Bembo’s edition of 1502 with seven manuscripts (the project was eventually carried out in 1595 by the Accademici della Crusca); also noteworthy is a second set of textual annotations, this time by Martini alone, which can be dated to 1551 and are worth studying for their range and versatility: thanks to his acquaintance with both Dante’s oeuvre and the long tradition of its commentators and editors, not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge (spanning from the classical world to medieval science), Martini could critically assess the variae lectiones and not unfrequently emend the text by conjecture. In a similar vein, Martin McLaughlin’s article (‘Un petrarchista legge la Commedia: il Dante postillato da Giovanni Brevio,’ pp. 101-116) explores the unpublished annotations on Bembo’s 1502 edition (the book is now preserved in the Bodleian Library) by the Venetian poet Giovanni Brevio (ca. 1480-ca. 1560), which turn out to revolve less on the lectio of Dante’s text and more on its content (characters, classical and biblical sources, etc.), language, and metre.
Petrarch is the subject of a long essay – the longest of the collection – co-authored by Paola Vecchi Galli and Tommaso Salvatore (‘Ex originali libro. Schede sul canzoniere casanatense,’ pp. 133-165), which considers the dissemination of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in Veneto in the late 1450s, when Bartolomeo Sanvito made a copy (now MS Casanatense 924) “ex originali libro”, that is from Petrarch’s own exemplar (now MS Vat. Lat. 3195); this exercise in textual stratigraphy also includes the study of later annotations on Sanvito’s manuscript, whose attribution to Ludovico Castelvetro the two scholars are inclined to call into question here. Devoted to a later phase in Petrarch’s textual scholarship is an article by Paola Italia (‘Alle origini della filologia d’autore. L’edizione del “codice degli abbozzi” di Federico Ubaldini‘, pp. 379-398), which aims to single out methods and scope of Ubaldini’s epoch-making edition of Le rime di M. Francesco Petrarca (1642), based itself on one of Petrarch’s original manuscripts.
As far as Boccaccio is concerned, a contribution by Carlo Caruso (‘Boccaccio anni Venti: Andrea Calvo, Hieronimo Claricio, Tizzone Gaetano da Pofi,’ pp. 177-191) dwells on the editorial policies, especially in matters metrical, deployed in the first printed editions of Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione, concentrating in particular on the princeps (1521) edited by Hieronimo Claricio (Girolamo Claruzzi) and its controversial role in twentieth-century Boccaccio criticism (in Vittore Branca’s authoritative editions – 1944, 19742 – Claricio’s text stands out as being the only extant testimony of an alleged second redaction). Riccardo Drusi (‘La filologia di Vincenzio Borghini,’ pp. 327-341) offers a reappraisal of Borghini’s Annotazioni (1574) on Boccaccio’s Decameron, which set out to import into the domain of Italian textual criticism the methods of Politian’s classical scholarship, including not only the thorough examination of any extant manuscript but also constant reference to loci paralleli. Equally crucial the distinction put forward by Borghini between two types of scribes: those who usually produce copies of classical Latin texts with the utmost respect for the original; and those who while copying texts in the Italian vernacular feel free to edit and even shorten them (this second type bordering on a third one, namely, the copyst who knows it all – or “il copista saccente”).
Both Dante and Boccaccio resurface in a chapter by Luca D’Onghia (‘Primordi della filologia dialettale,’ pp. 311-325) which surveys the first stages of the philological treatment of texts in dialect: examples include Giovan Giorgio Trissino’s “passività” (p. 314) in his 1529 edition of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia regarding the quotations in lombard; the controversy arisen in 1552 between Ludovico Dolce and Girolamo Ruscelli on Boccaccio’s Decameron (triggered, among other things, by diverging approaches to the problem of how to handle the sections in dialect); and Giorgio Greco’s edition of Ruzante’s works (Vicenza, 1584), which shows the editor’s efforts to turn the rural Pavan dialect into a language at once rustic and consistent. In fact, the search for linguistic stability was far from being over in the realm of the vernacular: an article by Matteo Motolese (‘Lingua d’autore nel Cinquecento. Storicizzazione, codificazione, idealizzazione,’ pp. 167-176) raises the question how textual critics and commentators managed to cope with a language still in the making and much in need of a codification, particularly in the areas of orthography (most notably spelling), morphology, and micro syntax. The process is well captured by the momentous transition from the notion of errore, still pivotal in Giovanni Francesco Fortunio’s Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (1516), to that of licenza, a notion crucial in Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525), which went hand in hand with Bembo’s direct experience of the “polimorfia grafica” of the original (i.e. Petrarch’s autograph, now MS Vat. Lat. 3195).
Speaking of codification, punctuation is another area where the growing need of stability was stimulated, and inevitably complicated, by philological concerns. Annalisa Cipollone (‘Parole tra parentesi,’ pp. 37-55) documents the introduction of a new system of punctuation that also entailed a new way of interpreting the text, one which was arguably closer to editing than commenting. The template for it was provided by the aldine editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Dante’s Commedia (respectively in 1501 and 1502, both edited by Pietro Bembo), which feature prominently the round brackets or parentheses that Bembo had first used in his De Aetna (1496).
No less in the making was the field of Italian lexicography. As well as Carlo Vecce’s preliminary exploration of Leonardo da Vinci’s idiosyncratic lists of technical, mostly abstract, terms preserved in one of his ‘zibaldoni’ (‘Leonardo filologo? In margine al codice Trivulziano,’ pp. 1-7), lexicography is at the centre of a paper by Veronica Ricotta e Giulio Vaccaro (‘«Riveduti con più testi a penna». La filologia di Bastiano de’ Rossi,’ pp. 343-359), which revolves around the youngest among the founders of the Accademia della Crusca, a key figure in the team that produced the first Vocabolario (1612). On occasion, Bastiano de’ Rossi and his fellow Accademici had to turn themselves into editors – as in the case of the vernacular versions of Pietro de’ Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorum and of Albertano da Brescia’s treatises – in order to be able to base their lexical scrutiny on philologically reliable texts, although their overarching linguistic standards prevented them from always accepting “la lingua dei testimoni” (that is, the lectio attested in the manuscript tradition of a given text). Further materials and suggestions on the interplay between lexicography and textual criticism at the Accademia della Crusca are provided by Paolo Trovato (‘Qualche appunto sulla filologia della prima Crusca,’ pp. 361-377). Needless to say, Florence had been a center of philological and editorial activity in the area of Italian literature well before the foundation of the Crusca in 1583: Lino Leonardi’s contribution (‘Guittone nella Giuntina del 1527,’ pp. 61-81) focuses on the epoch-making collection of Sonetti e canzoni di diversi antichi autori toscani printed in Florence in 1527 by the heirs of Filippo Giunta, in particular on the materials making up the book VIII ascribed to Guittone d’Arezzo, an attribution subsequently contested and rejected (Leonardi’s own recommendation is to get used to such a label as “pseudo-Guittone”); the 1527 Giuntina and, more generally, the fortunes of Italian thirteenth-century poetry in the early sixteenth century are also the subject of a paper by Claudio Vela (‘Poesia del Duecento nel primo Cinquecento: istruzioni per l’uso,’ pp. 83-100).
Several chapters examine the philological treatment of texts that, for one reason or another, proved to be less removed than usual from the critic, editor, or scribe who was engaging with them. Taking up a line of research best exemplified by Domenico De Robertis’s 1974 article on Antonio Manetti copista, Alessio Decaria (‘Poeti, copisti e filologi tra Quattro e Cinquecento,’ pp. 19-35) addresses several cases in which the copyist of a poetic text happened to be a poet himself (though Decaria does not shy away from acknowledging the scepticism that haunts his approach: “il limite di questo genere di analisi consiste proprio nell’impossibilità di verificare se le innovazioni presenti nella copia che si analizza siano effettivamente da addebitare al copista-rifacitore o non siano piuttosto, almeno in parte, effetto delle precedenti trascrizioni”, p. 26). The scholarly distance and dispassion typically (albeit not exclusively or necessarily) decreases when a text and its critic(s) belong to the same age, not to mention the cases in which a given author is at once the subject and the object of philological exercise; generally speaking, the volume does not leave any doubt about the potential overlapping (and ensuing messiness) of literary creativity and textual criticism, which may take on different forms and lead to the most disparate outcomes.
In Emilio Russo’s study (‘La prima filologia tassiana, tra recupero e arbitrio,’ pp. 293-310), the virtual inextricability of textual production, transmission, and criticism is most visible and possibly disheartening. Dario Brancato (‘Filologia di (e per) Cosimo I: la revisione della Storia fiorentina di Benedetto Varchi,’ pp. 257-273) juxtaposes Varchi’s Storia fiorentina as the author had reconfigured it before dying and the Storia fiorentina eventually edited for, and with the active intervention of, Cosimo I by his secretary Baccio Baldini. Paola Moreno (‘Filologia d’autore, filologia della copia e per il testo a stampa. La battaglia della Ghiaradadda e i suoi effetti nella Storia d’Italia di Francesco Guicciardini,’ pp. 239-255) offers a reassessment of the textual and editorial history of two loci from book VIII of Guicciardini’s masterpiece, which throw new light on its genesis as well as Guicciardini’s historical standards and philological methods. Marco Dorigatti (pp. 193-215: ‘Momenti della filologia ariostesca nel Cinquecento’) explores the 1556 edition of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso printed by Vincenzo Valgrisi and edited by Girolamo Ruscelli, who claimed to have at his disposal a list of corrections drafted by Ariosto himself in view of a new revised edition which he did not live long enough to publish (the autenticity of such list has been mostly rejected by modern scholars, including Dorigatti, who traces this fabrication back to Ruscelli’s “istanza ammodernatrice” disguised as “ragioni pseudo-filologiche”). Claudia Berra (‘Giovanni Della Casa umanista e filologo,’ pp. 217-237) provides a detailed presentation of Della Casa’s humanistic and philological endeavours over two decades, from his 1537 quaestio lepidissima (and indeed misogynistic) called An uxor sit ducenda to his 1553 zibaldone umanistico, which included variae lectiones of several classical authors as well as annotations on Plutarch’s Moralia. Finally, Paolo Procaccioli (‘Filologia epistolare del medio Cinquecento. La lettera tra pratica individuale e teorizzazione,’ pp. 275-291) addresses the philological problems raised by the textual instability inherent to epistolography, a genre which appears to have its own ethos (so to speak), one which allows the author to move away from the text of a letter as it stood when it was first drafted and dispatched, the revision being sometimes substantial (on the lexicon no less than the syntax) and occurring many years from the original exchange.
Gian Mario Cao, Eastern College Consortium in Bologna