Storie e linguaggi

The set of traces, comments and notes found in the manuscripts of the Commedia represents a precious pool of information to draw on to reconstruct both pieces of the history of medieval culture and the mythopoeic process that leads to the creation of a canon of figures and famous passages of the work. It is proposed to bring them together under the label limina (a word that evokes the passage from the text to the reader, but also the threshold to cross to leave testimony of oneself) and to classify them so that they can become usable material for a research project that includes all the eight hundred mss. of Commedia.

The article focuses on three different manuscripts containing unattributed glosses to the Comedy that had never been examined before. The first one, BL Egerton 2567, contains an extensive commentary that was revised by the Recollectae Ferraresi of Benvenuto da Imola and is also familiar with the other two drafts of the Comentum. One of the glosses in the manuscript, which might be the beginning of an unknown poetic text, refers to Alighieri as ser Dante, providing a precedent for ser Durante from the Fiore. The second manuscript, the Florentine II.I.32, contains the only correct description of the gesture of the fiche (Inf., XXV 2), which was previously known only in a figurative form through miniatures. The last example is taken from Pluteo 40.30, explicitly dated 1462, which hosts some contemporary glosses reminiscent of Landino’s commentary (1481), causing a disruption that calls into question certain datings.

This paper analyzes in detail the autograph annotations written on the Riccardian Code 1036 by Bartolomeo Ceffoni (1363-post 1431), a small landowner from Figline Valdarno, who affixed numerous vernacular annotations to the margins of the Comedy, also using a large part of the blank sheets of the ms. for the preparation of a notebook, a reflection of his cultural dimension and personal library. The dense work of annotations, which can be dated certainly between 1430 and 1431, outlines the physiognomy of a passionate reader, animated by multifaceted interests, as revealed by the various anthologized texts, wich were supposed to contribute, at least in the original intentions, to the poem’s illustration; of particular interest are the thirteen verses portrayed in a Dante’s lost painting in the Florentine cathedral, a list of the Comedy’s oldest readers and commentators, various ternaries of the Boethian vulgarization of Alberto della Piagentina, eighteen octaves of an anonymous “cantare”, identifiable with the poemet Già Febo co’ cavalli gìa correndo, a series of anonymous rhymes and excerpta from Marco Polo’s Milione.

The article purports to illustrate and discuss the most relevant interpolations added to the text of Dante’s Comedy. The study moves from the list of eight additions included by Marcella Roddewig in her well-known catalog; one further interpolation, discovered in a manuscript held by the Biblioteca Comunale di Imola, will also be examined. The aim is to trace the dynamics of inserting and rewriting in the manuscript tradition of the Comedy, distinguishing between ‘interpolations dictated by codicological and material reasons’ and ‘interpolations of a narrative quality’. Evaluating the methods and purposes as well as the formal and stylistic outcomes of such rewriting procedures will allow to investigate the production, diffusion and fruition of our literary heritage between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

This article aims at analyzing the content of the instructions for the illuminator contained in Budapest’s Comedy (University Library, Italicus 1). The first part of the work will be devoted to the analysis of the phenomenology of the indications for the illuminator. These notations could contain a basic level of information concerning only the iconographic subject to represent (“reference instructions”), or a deepest level of information regarding the way in which to realize the prescribed scenes (“guiding instructions”). While the former seem to presuppose a prior knowledge on the part of the illuminator of the figurative tradition to be represented, or the availability of additional aids for the artist, the latter generally respond to the profile of annotations created for texts without a consolidated tradition of images, or to meet the needs of particularly demanding concepteurs or patrons. On the basis of the proposed analysis, the instructions for the illuminator in the Hungarian codex seem to fall into the category of guiding instructions, and this is in line with the early dating of the witness.

This paper investigates the illuminations of the Comedy ms. Ausst. 33 of the Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main, focusing on the function of places of passage between the different elements of the book-system that some of them play.
The Frankfurter codex contains the text of the poem followed by the commentary by Iacomo della Lana; each cantica is introduced by an illuminated frontispiece consisting of a figured initial and a large narrative scene in the bas de page, with subjects that are systematically inverted in the three initial pages of the corresponding sections of Iacomo’s commentary, in an evident intention to create visual continuity between the different parts of the codex, at the same time emphasising the different nature of the texts linked by the images. The same image-threshold function can also be discerned in certain figured initials in the commentary, which also qualify as “gateways” between the commentaries and the poem, helping the reader to retrieve Dante’s content before tackling the reading of Iacomo’s work.

The first part of the article serves as an introduction to the main features of legal texts and their transmission; particular attention, given the context, is given to marginalia which are peculiar to legal texts, such as the glosses. The introduction also provides a summary of how the evolving of the texts over the time had a great impact on the very making of the book, starting from the page. Then, the core of the article follows which is dedicated to the study of the transmission of legal texts from the perspective of the bibliographer and historian of the book also to underlie that he/she will have to take into consideration studies published by legal historians. The method under proposal includes the development of a digital platform (IVS Commune online) of which the main features are provided. In doing this, the author of this article offers some observations on methodology as well as some thoughts on matters of cultural politics.

The codex Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, S. Pant. 8 is a miscellany already known to scholars for questions about Dante’s texts. A recent paper, focused on the complex codicological and paleographical features of the manuscript, proves that the copy of the codex is near the middle of the XIVth century. The analysis of some graphic evidence in the limina, their relationship with both the material and textual data of the codex and some references that can be detected in archival sources, can allow us to assume new details about the genesis and the early history of this manuscript.

Signs of attention, annotation and marginal writings around a literary work contained significant information about the reception of the text. Dante’s Commedia aroused immediate reactions in readers, which led them to annotate, explain and comment on the verses of the poem. A case study is represented by MS. 8530 of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris. The codex features maniculae, notes, drawings, diagrams, annotations, and comments from various exegetical systems. Among them, there is the proemium taken from the Commentary on the Commedia by Iacomo della Lana.

There is a marginal zone both in manuscripts and printed codes in which palimpsests and voice-overs are layered over the years, becoming part of the peritesto. It does not provide accidental information, but rather it allows one to go beyond the textual analysis; “traces” that made it possible to reconstruct a posteriori the cultural-historical events about manuscripts and printed codes, although they have always been relegated to a ‘borderline’ zone. Therefore, this article proposes an analysis of marginalia and limina, specifically of the manuscript Italien 530, also known as Par. 530, which is part of the Divine Comedy’s manuscripts tradition. The aim is to demonstrate how writings and some elements of the iconographic-illustrative apparatus, seemingly of no importance, can turn out to be fundamental and of considerable interest to the events that underline the workmanship of the codex per se. It is the case of the manuscript Par. 530, which, through such elements, gives voice to the intricate political and personal dynamics between Pandolfo III Malatesta and Pope Pius II in the first half of the 15th century.

The essay presents a series of footnotes written by an anonymous reader between the late 16th and the early 17th centuries on a “Giuntina di rime antiche” (1527) conserved at the General Library of the University of Tokyo.