La summa «Cognito...» nel panorama dell’ars dictaminis francese del XII secolo: proposta di edizione.

Starting from the second half of the twelfth century the ars dictaminis became widespread in France, in particular within the schools of the Loire Valley (Tours, Orléans, Meung etc.), as attested by the production of a series of artes dictandi and collections of letters that refer to these places. Among these handbooks we find the summa «Cognito…», named after its own incipit: it is an unpublished collection of epistolary models that was attributed by one of its witnesses to an unknown magister named Rudolf of Vendôme, which however, throughout the rest of the tradition, kept circulating anonymously. Our comprehensive investigation of the summa «Cognito...» enabled the exploration of its manuscript tradition, it highlighted those peculiarities that differentiate the summa from other coeval artes, and it eventually allowed to establish the culture of its unknown author. This investigation has also revealed the presence of rhetorical material of different origin and nature that, for different reasons and at different times of the tradition, has either gravitated in the same orbit as the one of our anonymous collection, or has been influenced by it. For this reason, the editio princeps of the summa «Cognito...» will also be followed by that of these associated texts.