Boccaccio as Anthologist and The Dawn of Editorial Auctoritas

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.¹ 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.² 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:

Many will be astonished, I think, because I have not put the divisions of the sonnets in the text, as the author of the present little book did; but to this I answer that there were two causes. The first is that, since divisions of the sonnets are clearly declarations of them, it appears that they should be gloss instead of text, and so I have placed them as gloss, not text, since the one is not well mixed with the other. If someone were perhaps to say here that the explications of the sonnets and canzoni he wrote could similarly be called glosses, because they are no less declarations of them than are the divisions—I say that, insofar, as they are declarations, they are not declarations made to declare, but rather demonstrations of the causes that led him to write the sonnets and canzoni. And these demonstrations still seem to belong to the principal intention of the work, so they deserve to be called text and not glosses. …³

Hence, Boccaccio's Vita nuova is a text composed of lyric poems and narrative prose, accompanied by marginal glosses. Boccaccio's copies of the Vita nuova also provide a complex system of references consisting of both capital letters of four different shapes and sizes and paragraph marks that follow the system of ordinatio compilativa used in scholastic university books.⁴ This peculiar mise en page, establishing a connection with the scholastic universe, materializes Boccaccio's interpretation of Dante's prosimetrum, and more generally of his poetry: Boccaccio aimed at the canonization of Dante and at the promotion of vernacular poetry, and he pursued this objective in multiple ways, one of which was the graphic form in which the works by Dante (and Petrarch and Cavalcanti) were presented to readers. Through these editorial practices, and also by placing the Vita nuova in consistent anthologies containing a selected and carefully chosen corpus of Dante's works—that is to say, the literary works in a more elevated style⁵—Boccaccio profoundly shaped the reception of the Vita nuova. His intervention produced a set of peculiar characteristics that renders the manuscripts deriving from his copies immediately recognizable. Not only the selection and the order of Dante's texts...