The New Philology of Michele Barbi and the Edition of Popular Texts

Michele Barbi (1867 - 1941) can be considered the founder of the new Italian philology, based on a revision of Lachmann's method whose results are entrusted to the critical edition of De Vulgari Eloquentia, to the studies on Dante's Canzoniere and to the contributions later collected in the volume The new philology and the edition of our writers from Dante to Manzoni (1938). Using correspondence with other scholars and theoretical statements, the article investigates the contribution given to the birth of the new philological method from Barbi's interest in popular poetry, which constitutes the second 'horn' of Barbi’s studies, alongside Dante's. At first they are taken into consideration the scholar's training at the school of Alessandro D’Ancona (1835-1914), who was also an important scholar of popular literature, as well as of Dante, and was able to initiate a whole generation of his pupils to investigate folklore. After considering the main aspects of Barbi's studies on Dante, we examine, also in connection with the studies of other folklore researchers, the project, to which Barbi's fame as a scholar of popular poetry is linked: that is to say the Raccolta di canti popolari e melodie (‘Collection of popular songs and melodies’), which remains the largest and most important corpus of Italian popular literature. The Collection, the result of gathering and arrangement of the materials carried out over a period of 50 years, was never published by Barbi or by his students, except for a few samples. Third, attention will be paid in the speech to the methods that Barbi used in the collection of songs and to the theoretical problems he faced (how to publish a popular text, the relationship of the text with the music), that are still today the guiding criteria of research on folklore poetry.