As is the case for all of Dante’s other works, the original manuscript of the Commedia is not available. Nonetheless, the work was extraordinarily successful and widely distributed right from the early decades of the fourteenth century, throughout the peninsula and across a wide range of sociocultural contexts. More than 800 manuscript copies are extant, of which just over 80 were prepared before the mid-fourteenth century. On might add that Dante’s poem was the only text in the vernacular to be reproduced in the full range of scripts available: alongside luxury codices are desk copies, typical of the university world, but also lower-end products with cursive scripts stemming from merchant circles. Many codices include commentaries, and there are some remarkable illustrated ones, occasionally with what seems to be actual exegesis via illustration. Boccaccio played a crucial role in the transmission of the Commedia, copying, correcting and contaminating the text of the poem a full three times. The editio princeps of the Commedia was printed at Foligno in 1472 by Giovanni Neumeister. Many further editions emerged in the sixteenth century, among which the version edited by Bembo for Aldo Manuzio in 1501.
Classifying the vast conglomeration of manuscripts with the aim at arriving at a reliable text of the Commedia continues to be one of the thorniest problems in Italian philology. The 1966-67 Petrocchi edition, based on the old standard version, namely the 27 codices thought to have been produced prior to Boccaccio’s editorial adjustments, is as yet unsurpassed. Antonio Lanza’s edition appeared in 1996, based exclusively on the Florentine Codex Trivulziano 1080. The text edited by Federico Sanguineti was published in 2001, based on a group of 7 codices, a determining role being played by the Codex Urbinate latino 366, whose linguistic patina, however, is of the Emilia-Romagna area.
The Commedia: manuscript and editorial history
