Giovanni Boccaccio

Boccaccio’s entire intellectual activity is linked to Dante, and Dantean echoes and more or less explicit references permeate his work. For Boccaccio, Dante’s works constituted an object of enthusiastic study and worship, manifest in his own output as copyist, biographer and commentator on the Commedia. A copyist by passion, he made changes, interpolated, and contaminated texts, but played a decisive role in the tradition of almost all of Dante’s works. In some cases, his work became indispensable: the eclogues and three epistles (III, XI, XII) are extant exclusively in Boccaccio’s manuscripts (Laur. Plut. XXIX 8). The Toledano 104 6 is also decisive, containing the Commedia, the Vita Nuova, and 15 of Dante’s canzoni in a sequence at least partly replicated in his later manuscripts (codices Riccardiano 1035, Chigiano L VI 213 and L V 176). These manuscripts led to highly productive branches in the textual tradition of the works they contain, but they are also an essential reference for modern critical editors. Boccaccio’s biography of Dante, known as the Trattatello in laude di Dante, is preserved in three different redactions. Its encomiastic tone and the unfounded or unreliable details it contains do not preclude the possibility of finding relevant information, enabling us, for example, to identify Beatrice correctly. Towards the end of 1373, Boccaccio was commissioned by the Commune of Florence to undertake a public reading of the Commedia at the Church of Santo Stefano in Badìa, but was obliged for health reasons to interrupt this reading definitively. His notes are gathered under the title Esposizioni sopra la Comedìa, and, although they stop at the first lines of Inf. XVII, provide some penetrating literal interpretations and indicate an irresistible attraction to narrative cues in Dante’s text, which Boccaccio frequently exploited for his tales.