Appunti preliminari su un nuovo codice di Petrarca volgare; Parte I

Abstract

Since the University of Pennsylvania libraries’ acquisition in spring 2024 of a heretofore unknown fifteenth-century Florentine manuscript devoted to Petrarch’s two principal vernacular works, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and the Triumphi, a manuscript that had remained in private hands until its sale, codex MS 2196 has become the object of intense study by the Petrarch scholars who comprise the core team of the Petrarchive. In late September of 2024, as part of Penn’s Kislak Center presentation of the manuscript with lectures and Petrarchan music, our early results were presented by three of the authors, who put into the larger contexts of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscript production and illumination the manuscript’s features and unique place in the history of the early transmission of Petrarch’s lyric poetry in Italian. In this first part of our essay, we offer a complete description of the manuscript and a preliminary orientation to its role within the larger production of the Florentine workshop where, to date, we can confirm that at least eight other manuscripts of at least one if not both of the two works, often including Leonardo Bruni’s Life of Petrarch, were produced by a single copyist and illuminated — to varying degrees of quality and palette — with the same iconographic image of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, who is in the process of being transformed into a laurel tree. Within that context, we consider unique characteristics that demonstrate how the copyist of codex 2196 negotiated both problematic textual and material issues and handled over time and in multiple copies changing editorial ideas about the text and production of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. The second part of the essay, to be published in the fall issue, will delve deeper into more complex issues of variants and editorial norms across the manuscripts produced in the Florentine workshop.