Ancient Commentaries on Dante's Commedia: textual typologies and philological questions.
The last part of the course will focus on Dante’s reception between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, with particular regard to the Florentine tradition of public lectures on the Commedia.
- S. BELLOMO, Introduzione, in ID., Dizionario dei commentatori danteschi. L'esegesi della «Commedia» da Iacopo Alighieri a Nidobeato, Firenze, Olschki, 2004, pp. 1-49;
- A. MAZZUCCHI, Vent’anni di ricerche sugli antichi commenti: gli aspetti filologici, in Intorno a Dante. Ambienti culturali, fermenti politici, libri e lettori nel XIV secolo, Atti del Convegno internazionale di Roma, 7-9 novembre 2016, Roma, Salerno Editrice, 2018, pp. 491-512;
- Censimento dei Commenti danteschi. I. I Commenti di tradizione manoscritta (fino al 1480), a cura di E. MALATO e A. MAZZUCCHI, Roma, Salerno Editrice, 2011 (for a knowledge of Dante's ancient Commentaries and of their manuscripts).
Further bibliography will be given during the course. Some more texts will be indicated during the course and available for students.
Learning Objectives
The aim of this course is to study the textual transmission of the ancient commentaries to the Divine Comedy in order to analyze the guidelines of the exegesis on Dante in the fourteenth century. There is indeed a strong relationship between the manuscripts and the features of these commentaries. The study of the glosses on Dante’s Comedy will show the particular status of these exegetical texts, where the authors often reuse the works of other commentators. The analyze of these ancient commentaries will explain how Dante’s poem was read in the fourteenth century and how the edition of these texts is a particular philological problem.
Furthermore, by the end of the course students will be able to contextualize the reception of Dante’s Comedy in Florence in the period between the fourteenth and the fifteenth century. They will become aware of how the public lectures reached a very wide audience, embracing almost all levels of society. They will also be led to find out the ways in which such a teaching, mostly oral, influenced the coeval manuscript production related to the poem.
Prerequisites
Knowledge of Latin.
Teaching Methods
Frontal lecture.
Further information
The course will be taught by professors Luca Azzetta (24 hours) and Luca Boschetto (12 hours).
Type of Assessment
Oral examination.
Course program
An extraordinary complex poem, Dante’s Comedy, challenged its first readers and asked them to strive hard to be understood. When Dante was still living, his work (at least Inferno and Purgatorio) began to spread together with paratexts, that introduced the readers to understand his poem in a better way. Shortly after Dante’s death, many commentaries were written by identifiable men of letters. These exegetical writings show in which way the poem was received by Dante’s contemporaries. They also raise remarkable methodological issues concerning philological questions and manuscript transmission. This course focuses on reading and analyzing the commentaries on Dante’s Comedy, thus investigating some of the most relevant points concerning their interpretation. Their typical structure often shows an absence or a weakened presence of the author, thus encouraging corruptions and rewriting. The result is the building of a special category of texts and manuscripts, which add to the pre-existent material new interpretations and different versions. This changing transmission compels to reconsider the standard notion of ‘author’, ‘scribe’ and ‘source’.
Established by the city government in 1373, when the Signoria appointed Boccaccio to give exposition of the Comedy, the civic tradition of public lectures on Dante greatly contributed to keep alive in Florence the cult of the poet well into the fifteenth century. This cult, as well known, culminated in 1481, when the celebrated and influential Comento sopra la Comedia by Cristoforo Landino was first printed. During the period that extends from Boccaccio to Landino, both the city’s authorities and the university of Florence appointed a number of remarkable scholars as readers, among whom the humanist Francesco Filelfo deserves a special attention. The great impact of Filelfo’s oral teaching during the 1430s, — acclaimed, among others, by Vespasiano da Bisticci —, can still be appreciated thanks to several extant manuscripts of miscellaneous nature, both Latin and vernacular, compiled in the following decades by the citizens of Florence. The course will examine and give some examples of the most significant, and often unexplored, manuscript copies produced within the circle established in Florence by Filelfo.