The Rime dubbie

The lack of a precise arrangement of the Rime but also Dante’s increasing fame resulted in a manuscript tradition in which numerous fourteenth century poems, especially those of a moral-didactic sort, were attributed to him. Among the poems found most frequently in editions of his work through the years are an Italian paraphrase in terza rima of the Penitential Psalms, or Io scrissi già d’amor più volte, known as Dante’s Credo but in fact by Antonio da Ferrara. Besides these decidedly spurious texts, however, Barbi’s 1921 edition of the Rime includes an appendix of 26 poems of uncertain origin which he attributes to Dante. For some of the more likely poems, Dante’s authorship is coherently argued, to the extent that Contini includes them in his own 1939 edition, arranging and ordering them according to the plausibility of their attribution to Dante, and relegating those most easily recognizable as spurious to the end. Domenico De Robertis introduced substantial variations to this scheme in his recent critical edition (Florence 2002). On the basis of stringent manuscript criteria and highly pertinent stylistic features, not only does De Robertis exclude two sonnets from the list of uncertain poems, but also, and more importantly, he reassigns seven sonnets, transferring them from the appendix to the canon of Dante’s lyrical poems. Among these, somewhat surprisingly, is Quando ’l consiglio degli ucce’ si tenne, in terza rima, which Contini had placed at the end of his appendix of uncertain poems. Above all, however, De Robertis reassigns to the canon the trilingual canzone, Aï faus ris, por quoi traï aves, in which Latin, Italian and the langue d’oïl alternate. This highly significant reassignment opens up new perspectives – awaiting investigation - on Dante’s connection with the Oïl tradition, and cannot fail to have repercussions on the certainty of attribution in the case of the Fiore too.