Critical philology and Dante’s Commedia : A couple of thoughts and a few examples

Abstract

Not only literary students, but also well-known scholars share the idea that the reconstruction of a text is a routine job which leaves little room for creativity. After some 40 years during which I have edited or prepared the edition of works of Machiavelli (Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua), Pietro Aretino (Cortegiana) and Torquato Tasso (Aminta), and 17 years devoted to the textual transmission and the text of Dante’s Commedia, I think that, except for the first phases of the job, textual editing requires almost constant critical thought and interpretation. I shall present a little series of examples, mostly from Dante’s Commedia, with cases ranging from decisions in the realm of accidentals to rather complicated choices among competing substantial readings and to the risky enterprise of emendation against all the witnesses of the work. While these examples can give an idea of the novelty of some solutions of my forthcoming edition (the introduction and Inferno will appear in the summer of 2021), in my view, they seem to confirm the opinion of the great classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali, for whom textual criticism isn’t mechanical; it is methodical.