Dante’s Convivio between Manuscript and Print

When the first printed edition of Dante’s Convivio (Banquet) was published in 1490 in Florence, this unfinished poetic and philosophical treatise was the earliest of Dante’s minor works to appear in print after the editio princeps (first printed edition) of the Commedia by Johan Neumeister in Foligno (1472). Yet the manuscript tradition of the Convivio is unique among Dante’s works: the Convivio only began to circulate almost a century after the poet’s death in 1321. As a result, the textual history of the Convivio, and thus the very basis of the text itself, emerges as fragmentary and corrupted. As a text that its author never intended to publish, the Convivio challenges our understanding of editions and readership. Indeed, as Donald McKenzie notes, the field of bibliographic studies recognizes that new readers make new texts, and their meaning is a function of this new form.¹ My study of the diffusion of Dante’s Convivio demonstrates how the material manifestations of a text shape its reception and the format it assumes in modern editions. In fifteenth-century manuscripts, for example, the Convivio appears either alone or coupled with other texts; however, in the 1490 editio princeps and in the three subsequent sixteenth-century publications, the work always appears by itself. The publication of a printed copy as a single text confers a canonical status on the Convivio, particularly because the treatise is the first of Dante’s minor works to be published in print. How was the Convivio transformed from a virtually unknown rough draft, abandoned by the poet by 1308, into one of Dante’s canonical texts by the late fifteenth century, a text whose circulation became associated with Dante’s Rime, or collection of poems? The answer, I argue, lies in the fragmentary and provisional condition of the treatise in the manuscript and early print traditions. While modern readers encounter Dante’s Convivio, like his Rime, in a format that suggests it is a finished work, the manuscript tradition shows otherwise. This work, which was abandoned by its author, then revived, edited, and copied by admirers a century later, eventually led to the construction of a text that had not existed in the first place. It is the materiality of the manuscript transmission and the history of early printed editions that is responsible for the status of the Convivio as we know it today.

Dante did not circulate the Convivio during his lifetime, and the four oldest manuscripts (Vatican City, BAV, Barb. lat. 4086; Florence, BNC, II III 47; Florence, BML, 90 sup. 134; and Florence, BML, Ashb. 842) date from circa 1330–40, at least a decade after the poet’s death in 1321.² Most of the forty-five extant manuscripts of the treatise, all of which are Tuscan in origin, date from circa 1440–1482. Not only does the Convivio emerge in the manuscript tradition problematically late and significantly corrupted in relation to its archetype, but its unfinished condition has also led Dante scholars to hypothesize about the poet’s final intentions for the work. Boccaccio expressed in his Vita di Dante or Trattatello in laude di Dante Alighieri (Life of Dante) the belief that the treatise had been left unfinished because Dante died before its completion, even though the author had abandoned the project by 1307.³ It has been suggested that, with the election of Henry VII of Luxembourg as emperor in 1308, Dante redirected his attention to the struggle to bring about political reform in Italy, a conviction that finds expression in his Monarchia (1313) and in his political letters.⁴ Scholars have often treated the Convivio as a text that offers a precedent for the language, themes, and styles subsequently developed in the Commedia; a consideration of the chronology of Dante’s life and works, however, suggests that the poet abandoned the Convivio as a result of a new and profound vision that required the invention of a new and more sophisticated literary form in the Commedia.⁵

The unusually high number of errors identified in the manuscript tradition suggests that Dante did in fact leave...