Il laudario di Iacopone da Todi. Saggio di edizione critica e studio linguistico dei manoscritti di Chantilly e Londra

The dissertation consists of a partial critical edition of Iacopone da Todi’s Laudario, and is a part of a research project that encompasses its complete edition. Within this project, coordinated by Professor Lino Leonardi, are also Andrea Giraudo and Giuseppina Orobello, both of whom have already obtained their PhD degrees with theses on Iacopone. These theses were supervised by Prof. Leonardi during cycles XXXII and XXXIII) within the Romance Philology curriculum – Filologia e Critica PhD program of the University of Siena. In recent decades, Leonardi has consistently advocated for a new edition of Iacopone’s Laudario. Since 1988, prompted by the research discoveries of Gianfranco Contini and Rosanna Bettarini on the Laudario of Urbino, Leonardi has stressed the necessity of a recensio conducted across the entire spectrum of testimonia, demonstrating the feasibility of a stemmatic solution to the ecdotic problem of the Laudario. The editorial approaches of the two complete editions of the Laudario edited in the modern era, namely by Franca Ageno (1953) and Franco Mancini (1974), differ significantly. Ageno’s edition relies solely on manuscripts from the Umbrian group of the iacoponic tradition and it remains somewhat too closely aligned with the editio princeps, especially concerning the linguistic aspects of the edition. On the other hand, Mancini’s edition considers codices from other manuscript families, resulting in new textual findings. However, it does not employ a rigorous methodology for determining the genealogy of codices and, consequently, for establishing the constitutio textus. For the new edition of the Laudario, we will not consider the entire amount of testimonia. As Leonardi had already demonstrated during the “XXXVII Convegno storico internazionale (Todi, October 8th- 11th, 2000)”, the surveys conducted on the entire tradition «offrono [...] elementi abbastanza sicuri per operare una scelta che renda ragionevolmente praticabile il pur sempre immane lavoro» (Leonardi 2001, 196). In summary, we are focusing on a selected set of testimonies – about twenty – already identified as representatives of every branch of the tradition during the speech in 2000. The project of the new critical edition of the Laudario relies on this canon, with minimal changes. The «Comitato Nazionale per le celebrazioni del VII centenario della morte di Iacopone da Todi (1306-2006)», a research group led once again by Leonardi worked at the transcription and the collation of a great part of testimonia useful to the constititio textus. The research conducted by this team, with some results presented at the conference held in Todi in December 2006, affirmed the model proposed by Leonardi in 2000. However, it did not lead to the completion of the critical edition. The primary aim of my dissertation – that, along with those of Giraudo and Orobello marks the commencement of a new stage of the project – is to advance the work done by the members of Comitato Nazionale, whose materials, at our disposal, are located in Florence at the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini – Archivio Gianfranco Contini. Based on the agreed-upon division of tasks, the corpus has been divided into three blocks following the numbering of Mancini’s edition: laudes 1-33 have been assigned to Giraudo, laudes 34-66 to Orobello, and laudes 67-92, along with laudae incerti auctoris, to me. In the same order, we have established divisions to address the challenges related to the manuscript tradition of the Laudario, metric considerations, and linguistic aspects. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on examining issues related to the linguistic structure of the edition and analyzing specific language aspects present in two manuscripts: the laudari from Chantilly and London. In the second part, I present the critical edition of specific texts from the first section under my supervision.