Transcribing Petrarch’s Genres in the Late Fourteenth Century: An Ongoing Conversation with the Observations from MSS Cologny Bodmer 131 and Gambalunga SC-Ms. 93

Giulia Benghi

doi:10.14434/textual.v13i1.30074

Abstract

In spite of its apparent ‘betrayal’ of Petrarch’s visual poetics due to its one-column layout, the copy of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta contained in MS Cologny Bodmer 131 documents a way of employing common graphic devices that still shows awareness of the graphological distinctions among the five genres of the Fragmenta, and yet unavoidably slips in occasional errors deriving from the loss of Petrarch’s original mise en page. Gambalunga Sc-Ms. 93, in its first unit, reproduces the same choices of organization of the genres, and often even the same errors, demonstrating its derivation from the same antegraph as the Bodmer manuscript. The two copies, both from the end of the fourteenth century, provide evidence that such transcriptional choices were already consolidated shortly after the death of the poet, suggesting that scribes of the earliest copies of the Rvf did not follow the formats of their holograph.

Highlights

“As we think about the possibility of literary history and about the meaning of textual authority in relation to Petrarch, it will be increasingly necessary to take into account as many of the scribal versions of his poems as we can” (Del Puppo 2004, 131)
In the codicological examination made by Marco Cursi (2014) of the earliest manuscripts of the Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or the Rvf) we notice that the group of codices with layout “ad una colonna” is made up of only six manuscripts out of the total of 29 dated as “antiquiores”, and that only three out of those six are datable to the end of the fourteenth century
Our MSS Bodmer 131 and Sc-Ms 93 can be rightly added to the group, as they fully respect the two criteria applied by Cursi to his examination — the two criteria being 1) a dating within the first decade of the fifteenth century, and 2) the nature of the collections as books, and not as miscellanies

Summary

Introduction

“As we think about the possibility of literary history and about the meaning of textual authority in relation to Petrarch, it will be increasingly necessary to take into account as many of the scribal versions of his poems as we can” (Del Puppo 2004, 131).

Results

Conclusion