As part of the Italian Research Seminar, Ryan Pepin will speak on ‘Dietro la memoria non può ire’: Copyists’ Slips in the Textual Tradition of the Commedia.
Time and Place: Monday, November 10th (5th week), Taylorian, Room 2, 1-2:30 PM
Abstract: The enormous textual tradition of Dante’s Commedia – over 600 complete manuscripts – is a mine of data on how scribes worked in late medieval Italy. Thanks to the efforts of palaeographers and codicologists over the last twenty years, we have learned about the difference between professional and amateur milieux (Pomaro), the development of collaborative, serial book production in Florence (De Robertis, Ceccherini), copyists’ efforts to compare and correct their texts (Tonello) – even about the ‘habits’ of individual scribes (Marchetti).
This paper studies a type of error which to which Dante’s copyists were especially prone: errors that resulted from a good memory of the poem. By studying scribal innovations that ‘echo’ other lines in the text (Petrocchi), we come as close as we can to early readers’ ear for the poem: what they attended to, how they understood the poet’s style – and even, I will suggest, how they understood the poet’s own compositional practice.
Bio: Ryan is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York. He is currently studying medieval Latin rhythmical poetry that circulated in Italy during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
Header picture: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Canon. Ital. 108, fol. 32r, https://editions.mml.ox.ac.uk/editions/ante-purgatory/