Boccaccio as Anthologist and The Dawn of Editorial Auctoritas

Abstract

The role of Boccaccio as scribe and editor, and in particular as editor of Dante’s works, has been extensively studied in the last decades. Through his editorial practices, Boccaccio was able to define a turning point in the tradition of Dante’s oeuvre: with his books and his commentary, in a certain sense, Boccaccio gave birth to modern Dantean philology. He influenced both the textual and the material aspects of the tradition derived from the works he copied. Much attention has been given to Boccaccio’s Dantean anthologies (Toledo, Archivo y Biblioteca Capitulares, Zelada 104.6; Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 1035; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigiano L V 176 and Chigiano L VI 213), in which he copied fifteen canzoni, the Commedia, and the Vita nuova (which is not in the Riccardiano), along with his Vita di Dante (not in the Riccardiano) and the Argomenti in Terza Rima introducing the Commedia. In this essay, I focus on the Vita nuova, for which Boccaccio’s intervention is remarkable because it strongly shaped the reception of Dante’s work, due to the compelling implicit and explicit arguments that Boccaccio conveyed through the copies contained in the Toledo and the Chigi anthologies. I will first explore the dialectics among author, editor, scribes, and readers, and how these are reflected in explicit reactions to Boccaccio’s edition, as some notes added by copyists reveal. Then, in the second part of the essay, I will investigate the structure of a fifteenth-century manuscript whose selection of texts is a perfect example of a divergent reception of Boccaccio’s ideas on Dante. The most famous feature of Boccaccio’s edition of the Vita nuova is the placing of the divisioni in the margins. Boccaccio himself discusses this layout in the note Maraviglierannosi that appears on the first page of both of his transcriptions: