Eclogues: manuscript history and authorship issues

The manuscript tradition of the Eclogues revolves entirely around Boccaccio, who is probably also responsible for the archetype. Codex Laur. XXIX 8, an important document bearing witness to Boccaccio’s work, contains three letters by Dante, an actual corpus of bucolic verse consisting of the correspondence between Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio, including variants and important notes added by Boccaccio himself, Petrarch’s Argus and another eclogue from Giovanni del Virgilio to Albertino Mussato. The seven other instances also relate to Boccaccio’s work as both disseminator and author of bucolic verse, but derive from a manuscript in another hand which has now been lost. Until the new edition for the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante, the Eclogues are available in the critical edition with commentary produced by Giorgio Brugnoli and Riccardo Scarcia (Milan 1980).

The close dependence of the manuscript tradition of the Eclogues upon Boccaccio lies at the heart of doubts concerning their authenticity, expressed in the 1960s by Aldo Rossi, who argued, and not without valid reasons, that Boccaccio had produced a forgery between 1350 and 1351 in order to dispel Petrarch’s reservations about Dante.[1] His hypothesis, whose scientific basis was acknowledged, did not meet with consensus. On the contrary, Dante’s authorship of the eclogues to Giovanni del Virgilio was definitively confirmed by the investigations of two scholars. Paduan’s analysis of the errors in Codex Laur. XXIX 8 showed that they were typical of those made by scribes when copying work by another person, while Giuseppe Billanovich discovered a note written by Francesco da Fiano on the correspondence between Giovanni del Virgilio and Dante, relating to a course held in 1360 by Pietro da Moglio, who succeeded Giovanni del Virgilio as professor at the Bologna Studium[2].

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[1] A. Rossi, Dossier di un’attribuzione, in “Paragone. Letteratura”, 216 1968, pp. 130-72.

[2] Gius. Billanovich, Giovanni del Virgilio, Pietro da Moglio, Francesco da Fiano, in “Italia Medievale e Umanistica”, VI 1963, pp. 203-34.