The manuscript tradition of the thirteen letters is somewhat limited. For most of the letters excepting XIII, there is only one extant manuscript, although there are two in the case of V, and four for VII. Epistles III, XI and XII are in a manuscript in Giovanni Boccaccio’s hand, the Codex Laur. XXIX 8. The remaining letters are in the late fourteenth century Codex Vaticano Palatino 1729, the work of ser Francesco di ser Jacopo Piendibeni da Montepulciano, a friend of Colucci Salutati. There are, however, nine extant manuscripts of the letter to Cangrande. Three of these, dating from the fourteenth century, contain only the part with the dedication to Cangrande, while the other six, dating from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, contain the complete text of the letter. Nonetheless, the text was known to the early commentators of Dante’s Commedia, and had been explicitly indicated as Dante’s by Andrea Lancia as early as the mid-fourteenth century[1]. This detail, which emerged only recently, substantially diminishes the frequent doubts expressed concerning Dante’s authorship of the main part of the letter (that is, apart from the first 12 or 13 sections devoted to the dedication to Can Grande) or indeed the full text. On account of a number of anachronisms, the so-called letter to Guido da Polenta about Dante’s alleged ambassadorial mission to Venice in 1314, is excluded from the canon. Existing only in a vernacular translation, this letter comes from a prolific fifteenth century manuscript tradition and in an imprint by the unreliable Anton Francesco Doni. Other letters, most certainly by Dante, have been irretrievably lost, with traces remaining only in the testimonies of Giovanni Villani, Flavio Biondo and Leonardo Bruni. Bruni most certainly had access to letters written in Dante’s own hand, a script which he describes as “thin and long and very correct”[2]. Until the version for the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante is published, the standard edition of Dante’s letters is still the volume edited in 1921 by Ermenegildo Pistelli, although Enzo Cecchini has produced a recent critical edition of Epistle XIII (Florence, Giunti, 1995).

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[1] L. Azzetta, Le chiose alla ‘Commedia’ di Andrea Lancia, l’Epistola a Cangrande e altre questioni dantesche, in “L’Alighieri”, XLIV 2003, pp. 5-76.

[2] L. Bruni, Vita di Dante, in Opere letterarie e politiche, a cura di P. Viti, Torino, UTET, 1996, p. 548.

Epistle to Cangrande, critical edition and commentary by Enzo Cecchini