From the 1320s on, the Monarchia found favour among pro-imperial intellectuals, who cited Dante’s treatise, copied it and made glosses of it. The reaction in pro-theocratic circles was largely hostile: between 1327 and 1334, a sophisticated Dominican theologian named Guido Vernani wrote De reprobatione Monarchie, a refutation of Dante’s treatise; and in 1329, in Bologna, Cardinal Bertrand du Pouget, the son or nephew of Pope John XXII, had Dante’s text publicly burned, after which it was included in the Index of Forbidden Books until 1881. These events had a significant impact on the manuscript tradition: although many copies were destroyed, the interest it aroused resulted in the production of untitled or camouflage copies, such as the Codex Berlin Lat. fol. 437, containing, under the title Rectorica Dantis, both the De vulgari eloquentia and the Monarchia, with an explicit that states: Explicit endivinalo se ’l voy sapere. While only a couple of manuscripts can be dated to the fourteenth century, there are numerous fifteenth century codices, many of which derive directly from these earlier manuscripts, and all traceable to an archetype produced after Dante’s death. Two Italian vernacular versions are also traceable to the second half of the fifteenth century, one of which is attributed to Ficino. The princeps of the Monarchia was published in the Lutheran city of Basle 1559, with the first Italian publication arriving only in 1758.
The current reference edition is the one edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci in 1965 for the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante, although many objections have been raised. Making use of technological tools for her recent translation, Prue Shaw has collated a couple of new manuscripts and modified Ricci’s text in a number of places.
Monarchia: textual and editorial history
