Il canzoniere a stampa (1470-1530): tradizione e fortuna di un genere fra storia del libro e letteratura by Nadia Cannata (review)

Abstract

1008 Reviews discussion of the Vita nuova and its relationship to the Comedy; others may have wished for a fuller account of the philosophical and scientific content of the Rime petrose (which is surprising, given Bemrose's expertise in such matters); still others a more focused and critically informed discussion of allegory and allegoresis. For this reviewer the most problematic area of omission is the scant attention that Bemrose pays to literary considerations in his useful resume of the Comedy. Even though he acknowledges that less prominence is given to such matters, it seems a pity that his general reader is not made more fully aware ofthe intricate literary texture of Dante's poem, its rewriting of classical auctores, its poetic experimentalism, its plurilinguism, and its strong metaliterary concerns. There are also a few minor inaccuracies: Boc? caccio's lectures on Dante are 1373-74 (p. 17: not 1374-75); not all the Trecento commentators view Inf. 111.59-60 as being a reference to Celestine V (pp. 54-55); 'fior' in Purg. 111.135 means 'a little' (p. 142). Such criticisms aside, though, it is important to reiterate that the volume has much of value and that, while there is nothing new forthe Dante scholar, it deserves to be? come recommended reading forundergraduates, especially those approaching Dante for the firsttime. University of Warwick Simon Gilson II canzoniere a stampa {147 0-1530): tradizione efortuna di un generefra storia del libro e letteratura. By Nadia Cannata. (Dipartimento di Studi Romanzi, Universita di Roma 'La Sapienza', Filologia materiale, 1) Rome: Bagatto Libri. 2000. 475 pp. Lire 60,000. ISBN 88-7806-121-2. Nadia Cannata's study sets out to investigate the possible links between, on the one hand, the very large printed output (over fivehundred editions) of books of verse in Italy between 1470 and 1530 and, on the other hand, the birth, towards the end of this period, of a new ltalian literature and the definition of a system of literary genres in which lyric poetry was of foremost significance. These two phenomena were interrelated , she suggests, because the proliferation of verse in print tended to make literature into a marketable commodity, and in this context a reciprocal influence was created between text and form: 'La forma-libro si modella e si adatta al testo che il libro trasporta; il testo si piega, nel corso del tempo, ai desideri, veri, presunti o indotti di chi lo deve leggere' (p. 13). The consequence was the predominance, from 1501 onwards, ofa product standardized, even institutionalized, both in content and in physical appearance: the (at least apparently) unitary canzoniere printed in octavo format, in a single column, and without commentary. In Part 1 Cannata examines how this process took place and how the genre of lyric poetry was thereby defined. Up to the end of the Quattrocento, books of verse were, she shows, characterized by heterogeneity. Only about half of them contained canzonieri ordered by the author according to a deliberate sequence. Types of books ranged from editions of Petrarch that followed a scholarly model, with the text sur? rounded by a commentary and presented in quarto or in folio format, to 'instant books', typically consisting ofa single sheet with the text printed in quarto, in gothic type, and crammed into two columns. The turning point came with the firstAldine Petrarch of 1501, with its octavo format and single-column layout. This book was originally designed as a product foran elite courtly readership, but it offereda model that was soon extended to texts of more popular appeal. The emergence of a prestigious standard formthat could be produced relatively inexpensively led, in the second and third decades of the Cinquecento, to an expansion of printed production, with popular and more sophisticated verse being commercialized in the same way. MLR, 98.4, 2003 1009 Part 11traces in more detail the formal evolution of the printed book of verse as a material object up to 1530. Cannata focuses firston paper, as the most expensive item in the production process. She sets out to establish the dimensions ofthe sheets found in these books and concludes that their measurements remained largely stable throughout the Quattro and Cinquecento...