Il laudario di Iacopone da Todi. Edizione critica (parziale).

Iacopone da Todi’s “laudario” is a fundamental text of Medieval Italian literature. Despite its importance, this text hasn’t been published on the basis of objective and systematic criteria so far. The critical edition by F. Ageno (1953) improved Bonaccorsi’s incunable of 1490 (which had been the reference text until then) by means of the so-called “Umbrian laudari” (mss. London, British Library, Additional 16567 = L; Chantilly, Musée Condé, XIV.G.2 = Ch). However, that edition is still too much in Bonaccorsi’s debt as for various “loci” and the Perugian linguistic surface. The lack of explanation of the editorial criteria and the absence of critical apparatus are other evident limits of that edition. G. Contini criticised Ageno’s idea, according to which the entire tradition of the “laudario” stemmed from the so-called “Umbrian archetype”. Contini discovered, in the “Laudario urbinate” (ms. Roma, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, V.E. 849 = Urb), a witness independent of the “Umbrian archetype”; afterwards, R. Bettarini’s researches confirmed Contini’s discovery. F. Mancini’s edition (1974) tried to exploit the non-Umbrian sectors of the tradition; it got significant results, but it has many faults. Firstly, as for the “constitutio textus”, there is no precise methodological criterion. Secondly, Mancini doesn’t propose any analysis of Iacopone’s metric. Furthermore, while he believes it’s possible to reconstruct the “original” linguistic surface, his justifications are not convincing. The necessity of a critical edition based upon strong philological criteria and a careful “recensio” is thus clear. L. Leonardi has emphasised that need several times and he has planned and refined a methodological and operational approach. This thesis provides the critical edition of a portion of the “laudario” (eight texts) according to those criteria. It is based on a selection of witnesses, which were transcribed by a team coordinated by Leonardi. That selection represents the four families of Iacopone’s “laudario”, that is the Umbrian, the Tuscan-umbrian, the Venetian and the Tuscan family. In the critical edition, the Umbrian group is taken as reference point, as it preserves a consistent and homogeneous text. Moreover, the text of the Umbrian family is preserved in ancient manuscrits and it is presumably close to the “original” as for the linguistic surface. Alongside that criterion, special attention has been paied to non-Umbrian readings. The thesis is divided into two main parts, in addition to a foreword and the bibliography. Within the first section, chapter I describes the state-of-the-art and defines the methodological approach. Chapter II, first of all, clarifies the goals of the edition; secondly, it offers some notes upon the corpus of edited texts, the manuscripts chart, and a paragraph devoted to the surface manuscript (L). Chapter III is dedicated to the editorial criteria and the critical apparatus. The first paragraph deepens the editorial criteria. The second one firstly contains a retrospective on critical apparatus in previous editions of Iacopone; secondly, it justifies the tripartite structure of the apparatus in the current edition. Chapter IV takes stock of the new discoveries of this edition. The first part underlines the data which allow us to confirm the four families of Iacopone’s “laudario”. The second part points out the textual improvements made by this edition. Chapter V offers some remarks upon Iacopone’s metric by relying on data provided by the edited texts. The second section of the thesis presents the critical edition of the texts with introduction, critical notes and philological commentaries.