The Convivio: textual history

Left unfinished by its author at the fourth treatise, the Convivio was on the whole late in circulating: of the 45 extant manuscripts only two date from the fourteenth century, while the others all date from, or are datable to the fifteenth century. This tardy circulation is accompanied by frequent errors and gaps in all the codices, which, as Folena pointed out, can be traced to a poor-quality archetype[1], or perhaps to an original intended as provisional, like private notes or a preliminary draft that has not yet been copied out”[2]. The princeps was published in 1490 in Florence by Francesco Bonaccorsi, but with the sole exception of three Venetian prints in the early decades of the sixteenth century, there was a prolonged editorial silence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that came to an end only in 1723 with the publication in Florence by the Torrentini and Franchi Press.

An attempt was made to remedy the complex textual predicament of the Convivio in the early, methodologically unsound editions of the nineteenth century, which include the 1827 edition by the “Editori milanesi” and the later ones by Romani (1862) and Giuliani (1874-75). It was only in 1921 that Parodi and Pellegrini produced a rigorous edition for the Società Dantesca Italiana, but without a critical commentary. Their edition, however, was the one used for the critical commentaries published by Busnelli and Vandelli in 1937, and by Vasoli and De Robertis in 1988. In 1966, Maria Simonelli produced a new critical edition, closely based on the archetype, but deliberately avoiding analytical classifications in textual genealogy. In 1995, Franca Brambilla Ageno produced a new edition for the “Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante”, reconstructing in four large volumes the relationships among the manuscripts, and convincingly arguing in favour of restoration work – perhaps not essential in all cases - on the textual archetype.

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[1] G. Folena, La tradizione delle opere di Dante Alighieri, in Atti del congresso internazionale di studi danteschi (20-27 aprile 1965), Firenze, Sansoni, 1965, pp. 18-19.

[2] G. Gorni, Appunti sulla tradizione del "Convivio" (a proposito dell'archetipo e dell'origine dell'opera), in Id., Dante prima della ‘Commedia’, Firenze, Cadmo, 2001, p. 251.