Copie, commenti, traduzioni nella tradizione manoscritta della Commedia di Dante. Il caso studio della famiglia mad

This work, entitled "Copies, commentaries, and translations in the manuscript tradition of Dante’s Commedia. The case study of the mad family", aims to demonstrate, through the analysis of an emblematic philological case of the extreme complexity of the Commedia’s textual tradition, the internal stemmatic relationships within the mad family, examined in the light of new evidence emerging from the critical edition of the poem currently in progress under the direction of Paolo Trovato. By narrowing the focus to the two cornerstone manuscripts of the family – manuscript Md (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, 10186) and manuscript Rb (Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardina, 1005 and Milano, Biblioteca Nazionale, Braidense, AG.XII.2) – the study shows how, in certain cases, the history of a book may legitimately prevail over the history of the book. This perspective enables a deeper understanding of the dynamics of reading, circulation, and reception of one of the foundational texts of Italian and Western literary identity. The first chapter provides a brief excursus on the early circulation of the poem in northern Italy and, specifically, along the geographical routes through which the tradition of the mad subfamily developed. It also includes an overview of the history of critical editions, intended to establish a methodological framework for the investigation. The chapter then focuses on the relationships among the manuscripts of the subfamily and on the nature of the contamination affecting them, with the aim of clarifying their internal stemmatic relations. The second and third chapters concentrate on the importance of those liminal elements that accompany manuscript witnesses and accumulate at the thresholds of the text, allowing the reconstruction of the history of the reception, dissemination, and reading of the Commedia. In the case of Md, the analysis examines the relationship between the text of the poem and the first Castilian translation, dated 1428. The aim is not only to reconstruct the vectors of Dante’s reception in the Iberian Peninsula between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but also to analyse the translation itself with respect to the text of the poem as transmitted by Md. In the case of Rb, attention is devoted to the relationship between the text of the poem and Lana’s commentary, with the objective of reconstructing the working practices of the scribe Maestro Galvano within the Bolognese university milieu and of determining whether Rb diverges from the behaviour of the rest of the mad family are attributable to the influence of the lemmi of Lana’s commentary, to the commentary itself, or to the circulation of multiple exemplars. In conclusion, although circumscribed to the mad subfamily, this research offers a privileged perspective on the dynamics of dissemination, reception, and reading of the Commedia. Considered in their codicological and palaeographical dimensions, in the individual history of each witness, and in the stemmatic relationships that link them to other codices, the manuscripts of the mad subfamily made it possible to reconstruct a portion – limited yet significant – of the transmission and reception of Dante’s Commedia, demonstrating how Dantean philology continues to constitute a methodological proving ground of primary importance today.