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Reviewed by:
  • Genesis 49 – Une tradition italienne ed. by Christian Del Vento and Pierre Musitelli
  • Francesco Feriozzi (bio)
Del Vento, Christian and Pierre Musitelli, eds. 2019. Genesis 49 – Une tradition italienne. Paris: Presses de l'université Paris-Sorbonne. ISBN 979-10-231-0650-3. Pp. 215. € 33.

In the last few years, there have been several attempts to bring together different scholarly traditions within the field of textual sciences, such as the excellent Lexicon of Scholarly Editing of the University of Antwerp. The forty-ninth issue of Genesis, focused on Italian manuscripts, contributes to this same endeavour, as its title, Une tradition italienne, suggests, with its reference to both the Italian literary tradition and to the Italian tradition of studies on autograph manuscripts (that of the critica delle varianti/filologia d'autore and their antecedents).

The historical "frame" of the entire issue is presented in a preface by the editors where they underline the specificity of Italian culture's relationship with the manuscripts that make up its tradition. Whereas the rest of Europe did not develop the modern conception of the Foucauldian fonction auteur before the seventeenth century, in Italy it can be traced back to Petrarch and Boccaccio (if not to Dante), who show an extremely advanced understanding of the problems connected with the transmission and correct interpretation of their own texts. This specificity developed further with the Cinquecento Questione della lingua, when philological techniques began being adopted on Petrarch and Boccaccio as the rise of an "imitative" conception of the language called for a better understanding of Petrarch's compositional practices. Such concerns informed the approach to authorial manuscripts at least until Manzoni's linguistic reform in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, then, while beyond the Alps the génétique began to establish itself, in Italy the hegemony of Benedetto Croce's idealism on Italian culture hindered progress on the study of manuscripts: in this context, Gianfranco Contini, the first modern Italian scholar to systematically work on authorial variants, had to look for inspiration for his researches precisely from France.

The issue is divided in five sections—Enjeux, Études, Entretiens, Inédites, Chronique, plus a section of Varia, which will not be reviewed here. The Enjeux section is meant to give the reader a short history of the discipline, from the Early Modern and Modern Periods (Christian Del Vento) to the twentieth century (Paola Italia, Simone Albonico). Del Vento's article examines the relationships that various authors from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century had with the authorial manuscripts that were authoritative for them (Petrarch for the Cinquecento, Ariosto and Tasso for the Settecento and Ottocento, Manzoni from the nineteenth century [End Page 284] onwards). While underlining the specificity of each and every example he brings up, Del Vento finds a constant element in the Questione della lingua. He argues that what sparked the interest for authorial manuscripts was the necessity of reliable sources of these authors' language, and the need to understand their creative process in order to imitate it. The study of variants therefore has throughout the period a pedagogical aim, in opposition to the aesthetic aims of some twentieth-century studies and the scientific interests of contemporary authorial philology and genetic criticism. The identification of this pedagogical element is particularly important, and I believe it should be extended to early post-unitarian Italy, as testified by the claims of educational usefulness found in the introductions of the comparative editions of the Ventisettana and Quarantana versions of Manzoni's Betrothed produced in the late nineteenth century (Folli 1877, 1: i–vii; Petrocchi 1893–1902, 1: v–vii).

Albonico and Italia's articles are somewhat complementary to Del Vento's, as they cover the role that in the twentieth century Gianfranco Contini had in turning the study of variants into a proper scientific discipline, the critica delle varianti. Albonico gives particular attention to how Contini interpreted his teacher Santorre Debenedetti's work on Ariosto's autographs; Italia instead stresses the influence of the aesthetics of French symbolist poetry on the theorization of critica delle varianti (thus proving the existence of a common ground between the Italian tradition and critique gén...

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