DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA. The publication of Professor Pio Rajna's critical edition of Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia, which he has prepared for the Società Dantesca Italiana,' is an event of great interest and importance to all who are engaged in the serious study of Dante. As the book is only issued in a limited edition,2 and is in consequence not very easily accessible to the generality of Dante students, and as the annual Reports of the Dante Society are now commanding a steadily increasing circulation on both sides of the Atlantic, it was thought that those interested in the subject might be glad to have, in the form of a supplementary paper to the Report for 1897, a detailed collation of the text of the Florentine (1896) edition, with that of the Oxford (1894) edition (as representing the latest critical text previous to that of Professor Rajna). From this collation, which is printed below, it will be seen that the emendations and restorations introduced by Professor Rajna amount to several hundreds, and there can be little doubt that the large majority of them will be accepted as final by Dante critics. Before proceeding further, we may state that only three manuscripts of the De Vulgari Eloquentia are known to be in existence; of these, one (indicated by Professor Rajna as G) is in the town. library at Grenoble; the second (T) is at Milan, in the library of the Marchese Trivulzio; while the third (v) is in the Vatican library at Rome. This last (v), which was executed, probably at Rome in the early years of the sixteenth century, for Cardinal Bembo (in whose handwriting are many of the marginal notes), is practically of no independent value, being, if not an actual copy of T, at any rate derived from it. The chief value of v consists in the fact that it Il trattato De Vulgari Eloquentia, per cura di Pio Rajna: Firenze, Successori Le Monnier, 1896. 2 A certain number of copies remained over after the members of the Italian Dante Society had been supplied; intending purchasers may apply to the publishers direct or through a foreign bookseller. In compliance with a suggestion made by the present writer, Professor Rajna has undertaken to print a small edition consisting of the text alone. (Note. Since this paper was printed the promised edizione minore has been published. — See Appendix.) 2 CRITICAL TEXT OF THE DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA. occasionally gives the clue to the primitive reading of T, where this has been subsequently altered or obscured. G, which has recently been reproduced in phototype by MM. Maignien and Prompt, was executed probably in the north of Italy at the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. This manuscript formed the base of Corbinelli's edition of 1577 (Paris), the editio princeps of the Latin text, and many of the illustrative and critical glosses on the margins of it are undoubtedly due to Corbinelli, as Professor Rajna has conclusively proved. T appears to have been executed in Italy in the same district as G (the valley of the Po), and is a little earlier than it in date, belonging almost certainly to the latter half of the fourteenth century. To this manuscript also a special interest attaches, for it was at one time in the possession of Giovan Giorgio Trissino, and was the original from which he made his Italian version of Dante's treatise, the form in which the latter was for the first time printed in 1529. A large number of the corrections in this manuscript, both on the margins and in the text itself, are in the handwriting of Trissino, who evidently made a careful study of it. Upon his collations of these manuscripts Professor Rajna has based his text, while he has at the same time availed himself of such assistance as was to be derived from Trissino's translation, and from the various printed editions. Of the latter there have been about a dozen, the best known being those of Torri (1855), Fraticelli (1857), and Giuliani (1878); the most recent, as we have already observed, is that included in the Oxford edition of the complete works of Dante, published three years ago under the editorship of Dr. Edward Moore, Principal of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. It must be explained with regard to the subjoined collation that mere variations of spelling have been for the most part disregarded, as have been differences of punctuation, except where these happen to be of real importance. The passages given in the left-hand column are from the Oxford text (o), references being to book, chapter, and line (e.g. I. ii. 3); those in the right-hand column are. from Rajna's text (R), references in this case being to book, chapter, and paragraph (e.g. II. iii. § 4). PAGET TOYNBEE. 3 The original title was De Vulgari Eloquentia, as may be gathered from what Dante himself says (V. E. I. i. § 1 ; xi. § 2 ; Conv. I. 5): as well as from Villani's and Boccaccio's references to the treatise. 4 The omission of the first pica here in the modern edd. is due apparently to its omission by Trissino in his version. 5 Natura is a substitution of Corbinelli for nam. It seems better by a slight modification of the MS. reading, viz. quidē (= quidem) for quid è ( = quid est), to read “nam sensuale quidem" instead of "nam sensuale quid est " with R. 6 As R. remarks, profluisse is curious. For rationabiliter the MSS. read rationaliter. 7 The MSS. read personeat, fulgoreat; the correction adopted by R. is due to Giuliani. 8 The reading licebit... pracponere instead of licetur (which he did not understand) was introduced into the text by Corbinelli, the origin of it being Trissino's rendering sarà licito preporre. 9 Fraticelli and subsequent editors omit locutionis for no good reason. O. R. I. vii. 10. per primam . . elimi nata 15. et poenas malorum quae 18. Non ante tertiam 23. per superbiam suam et 27. sed et ipsum 34. quis pater tot sustineret 42. pars amussibus tegula- 60. nunc et barbarius 62. sanctum idioma I. viii. 1. Ex praecedenti memorata 4. tunc homines primum 10. demum ad fines occiden tales protracta est, unde primitus 10 The MS. reading cluminata (i.e. 'deprived of light') is rightly retained by R. Torri, followed by Fraticelli in his later editions, substituted eliminata, which was rejected at first by Giuliani in favour of elimitata, but restored in his final corrections. 11 The MSS. read et commiseras. Corbinelli inserted poenas malorum quae. The que (= quae) supplied by R. meets the difficulty, while its omission in MSS. is easily accounted for, as he points out. 12 MSS. per superbiam stultitiam. 13 The reading tegulabant for regulabant is due to Torri, who misread the MSS. Trullis for the MS. tuillis is a correction of Witte's. 14 R. reads principalis in obedience to the MSS.; otherwise he would have accepted principaliter, the reading of Corbinelli, as more suited to the context. 15 Est was supplied by Fraticelli, who followed Torri in omitting que. Forte is a correction of R.'s for the MS. fore, for which Corbinelli substituted unde, after Trissino's la onde. |