Working on the most-studied Italian text: making new the ‘paragraphematic’ level of Dante’s ‘Commedia
Dante Alighieri's (Divine) Comedy is the most widely transmitted (over eight hundred copies, including partial transmissions) and studied text in Italian literature. We do not possess either the autograph or the entire first season of transmission of the text – or rather, texts, since the three canticles that make up the poem were circulated independently of each other – as the oldest surviving copy (La) dates back to 1336, fifteen years after the author's death. The tradition is characterized by endemic and widespread contamination, with a very strong impact from horizontal transmission, to which the ‘mass production’ that began in scribes' workshops to meet the enormous demand for volumes probably also contributed. Although numerous editions have attempted (and continue to attempt) to deliver a reliable text of the Comedy, much remains to be done.
