The Stuttgart “Commedia”: New Investigation on a Famous Dante Manuscript

This paper offers an investigation on an ancient witness of Dante’s Commedia, the “German” cod. poet. et phil. fol. 19 (Stocc), preserved in Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek. The codex became fortuitously famous in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the attention of the great Dantista Adolfo Mussafia, who studied and entirely collated it, together with a second manuscript from Wien. But in recent years Stocc has returned to attract the scholars’ interest for its uncertain linguistic traits and for the possibility of a backdating within the chronological limit of the “antica vulgata” established by Giorgio Petrocchi. The essay can be divided in two sections: the first one is dedicated to resume the critical history of the witness and to point out some interesting codicological and textual features. The second part, instead, is reserved to the Linguistc appendix, a short and partial report on the language of Stocc.

Keywords: Dante, Commedia, Dante philology, Adolfo Mussafia, Stuttgart