Interpretation and Visual Poetics in Medieval and Early Modern Texts: Essays in Honor of H. Wayne Storey

361 Pages·2021·6.291 MB·English

by  Beatrice Arduini, Isabella Magni, Jelena Todorović.

Interpretation and Visual Poetics in Medieval and Early Modern Texts
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Medieval and Renaissance
Authors and Texts
Editor-in-Chief
Francis G. Gentry (Emeritus Professor of German, Penn State University)
Editorial Board
Teodolinda Barolini (Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian,
Columbia University)
Cynthia Brown (Professor of French, University of California, Santa Barbara)
Marina Brownlee (Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Professor of
Comparative Literature, Princeton University)
Keith Busby (Douglas Kelly Professor of Medieval French, University of
Wisconsin-Madison)
Jason Harris (Director of the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies,
University College Cork)
Alastair Minnis (Professor of English, Yale University)
Brian Murdoch (Professor of German, Stirling University)
Jan Ziolkowski (Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin, Harvard
University and Director, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection)
volume 26
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mrat
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Interpretation and
Visual Poetics in Medieval and
Early Modern Texts
Essays in Honor of H. Wayne Storey
Edited by
Beatrice Arduini
Isabella Magni
Jelena Todorović
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Illustrations in this volume are in public domain or are printed by permission.
Passages of the chapter Arduini, “Dolente me: son morto ed ag[g]io vita! The Sonnet Corona of
‘Disaventura’ by Monte Andrea da Firenze,” have been published in Arduini, “Per una corona di sonetti
di Monte Andrea da Firenze,” Acme 56, no. 3 (Settembre–Dicembre 2003): 167–93, for which the author
arranged the proper permission with the original publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arduini, Beatrice, editor. | Magni, Isabella, editor. | Todorović,
 Jelena (Professor of Italian literature), editor. | Storey, Wayne,
 honouree.
Title: Interpretation and visual poetics in medieval and early modern texts
 : essays on early modern texts in honor of H. Wayne Storey / edited by
 Beatrice Arduini, Isabella Magni, Jelena Todorović.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2022] | Series: Medieval and
 Renaissance authors and texts, 0925-7683 ; 26 | Includes bibliographical
 references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011115 (print) | LCCN 2021011116 (ebook) | ISBN
 9789004448018 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004461772 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Italian literature—To 1400—Criticism, Textual. | Italian
 poetry—To 1400—Criticism, Textual. | Dante Alighieri,
 1265–1321—Criticism, Textual. | Manuscripts, Medieval—Italy. | Early
 printed books—Italy. | Transmission of texts—Italy—History—To 1500.
Classification: LCC PQ4028 .I58 2022 (print) | LCC PQ4028 (ebook) |
 DDC 851/.109—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011115
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021011116
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 0925-7683
ISBN 978-90-04-44801-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-46177-2 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Introduction 1
Beatrice Arduini, Isabella Magni and Jelena Todorović
Part 1
Materiality and Visual Poetics
1 Historical Notes on Textual Scholarship: The Lectio Brevior
Potior Rule 17
Michelangelo Zaccarello
2 Transcription and Musical Memory in the Occitan Chansonnier
in Paris, BnF French 795 35
Daniel E. O’Sullivan
3 Editing the Somniale Danielis: The Earliest Italian Version of a
Dream Book 49
Valerio Cappozzo
4 Revisiting the Trespiano Fragment (Ca) of the Vita Nova 71
Jelena Todorović
5 Hysteron Proteron, Teleology, and Dante’s Commedia 82
Christopher Kleinhenz
6 The Vision of God (Paradiso XXXIII) and Its Iconography 94
Mirko Tavoni
7 Editing the Albi[z]zi Memorial Book 122
Isabella Magni
8 A Dantean (and Alfierian?) Incunable in the Olin Library at
Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) 142
Francesco Marco Aresu
9 What Did Late Medieval Italy Sound Like? 158
Dario Del Puppo
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vi Contents
Part 2
Hermeneutics and Literary Criticism
10 Dolente me: son morto ed ag[g]io vita! The Sonnet Corona of
‘Disaventura’ by Monte Andrea da Firenze 175
Beatrice Arduini
11 The Battle of Campaldino: Strategy, Tactics, and a Brief
Medical History 189
Giovanni Spani
12 Continuation and Conclusion of an Interpretation of Dante’s
Vita nuova XXII, 9–16 (Voi che portate la sembianza umile and Sè tu colui
c’hai trattato sovente) 204
Furio Brugnolo
13 Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete. A Dramatization of “utrum de
passione in passionem possit anima transformari”:
Conflict, Compulsion, Consent, Conversion 217
Teodolinda Barolini
14 Sodomy and Exile: Dante and Brunetto 243
Alessandro Vettori
15 A Reuse of Antiquity, Dante’s Way: The Brazen Bull of Phalaris 258
Marcello Ciccuto
16 Panfilo’s Mark (on Decameron I. 1) 268
Marco Veglia
17 Was Pronapides an Orphic? 288
Michael Papio
18 Jacopo Corbinelli’s De vulgari eloquentia (1577) and the Retorica di
Ser Brunetto Latini in volgar fiorentino (1546) 304
Anthony Nussmeier
Bibliography and Works Cited 319
Index 349
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Figures
6.1 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS. 8530, c 172r 95
6.2 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS. 8530, c 173r 97
6.3 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Holkham 48 (formerly Holkham Hall, Library
of the Earl of Leicester, 514) 98
6.4 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Holkham 48 (formerly Holkham Hall, Library
of the Earl of Leicester, 514) 98
6.5 London, British Library, MS. Egerton 943, c. 184v 99
6.6 London, British Library, MS. Egerton 943, c. 185r 100
6.7 London, British Library, MS. Egerton 943, c. 186r 100
6.8 London, British Library, MS. Yates Thompson 36, c. 190r 102
6.9 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. 255, c. 7v 114
6.10 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS. Lat. 427, c. 87r. Gioacchino da
Fiore, Expositio in Apocalypsim 114
6.11 Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, MS. 132, p. 13. Rabano Mauro,
De universo 115
6.12 Pistoia,S. Ba rtolomeo in Pantano, apsidal bowl. Manfredino da Pistoia,
Maiestas Domini, fresco, c.1280–1290 116
6.13 Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore. Jacopo Torriti, Dormitio Virginis, apsidal
mosaic, 1295–96 117
6.14 Assisi, upper church of the Basilica of Saint Francis, transept. Cimabue,
Vision of the Throne and Adoration of the Lamb, fresco, c.1275–1280 120
6.15 Assisi, upper church of the Basilica of Saint Francis, transept. Cimabue,
Apocalyptical Christ, fresco, c.1275–1280 120
6.16 Assisi, upper church of the Basilica of San Francesco, apse. Cimabue,
Assumption of the Virgin, fresco, c.1275–1280 121
7.1 Newberry Case MS J 035 714 (c. 124). List of Albizi in public office in San
Giovanni in Florence, between 1282 and 1532 125
7.2 NewberryVAUL T oversize Case MS 27, c. 1v. Pepo begins his memorial book
with a rubric indicating the beginning of the first section of the book (see
below) and with the transcription of the first entry: the payment of the
dowry of his first marriage. 127
7.3 NewberryVAUL T oversize Case MS 27, c. 35v 129
7.4 NewberryVAUL T oversize Case MS 27 (detail of c. 1v) displays a typical led-
ger mise en page: textual description on the left and sum of money due on
the right. 134
7.5 Digital representation of ms. Vat. Lat. 3195, c. 1r 137
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viii Figures
7.6 Digital representation of ms. Vat. Lat. 3195, c. 3v 137
8.1 Dante Alighieri, Comedia (Florence: Nicolaus Laurentii, 1481). Wesleyan
University, Olin Library Special Collections and Archives, Dav. C2 Incun.
1481 D (detail of the front flyleaf recto). Courtesy of Special Collections &
Archives, Olin Library, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT 148
18.1 Corbinelli’s notes on Dve I, XI (“L’Annotationi”, c. 38). As digitized by the
CAMENA Project, Heidelberg-Mannheim 314
18.2 Corbinelli’s emendations to his “L’Annotationi” (“Alcuni Aggiunti, o Emendati
Per Hora Alle Annot. Del I. Lib,” c. 57). As digitized by the CAMENA Project,
Heidelberg-Mannheim 314
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Introduction
Beatrice Arduini, Isabella Magni and Jelena Todorović
Essays in this collection are gathered around ideas central to the career and
scholarly contributions of H. Wayne Storey, clustered on the one hand around
the relationship of text content and its material container in medieval man-
uscripts and early printed books, and around literary criticism on the other.
Echoing Storey’s own approaches to textual interpretation and criticism, the
authors present the latest research on interpretation and materiality and visual
poetics as a means to understand the literary works that were created and cir-
culated in medieval and early modern Europe. This group of 18 essays opens
a conversation among scholars of diverse disciplines and backgrounds who
employ a range of different methods in investigating and interpreting texts in
manuscripts and early printed books. Their work intersects at the interrela-
tionship between words as text for interpretation and words on the page as
visual and material elements of specific manuscripts or books. Openness to
the meaning of words in both senses has been instrumental in Storey’s own
groundbreaking contributions to the premodernist scholarly community, and
is beautifully reflected in his seminal monograph Transcription and Visual
Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (1993), in his co-edited Brill volume (with
Teodolinda Barolini) Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (2007),
and in his other major publications, including the NEH-funded digital edition
of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (with John A. Walsh and Isabella
Magni): the Petrarchive.
In the early 1990s, Transcription and Visual Poetics offered, for the first time
in Italian literary criticism, a unique yet, as Storey himself said, simple pro-
posal: that early Italian poets composed their poetry with the material sup-
port they had in front of them—parchment, “the page”—in mind. By the late
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, as vernacular poetry became an inde-
pendent genre following the fairly recent divorce of poetry and music, authors
had another aspect of their creative endeavors to consider: that of material
support for their texts, the parchment that hosted their words and carried them
to various audiences and publics across geographical and chronological lines.
Storey’s creative and consequential invitation to consider spatial, visual ele-
ments of text composition and transcription in hermeneutics changed our way
of looking at medieval texts. Paleographers and codicologists were presented
with a roadmap for broader applications of their work, while scholars dealing
with textual criticism had to take into consideration the implications of the
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2 Arduini, Magni and Todorović
text’s material appearance in manuscripts. In other words, Storey’s study led
us to reexamine the nature of authorship by considering the ways in which
authors integrated scribal forms into their written poetics. Considering aural
and visual elements contemporaneously in the process of poetry production,
“these early Italian poets created a visual poetics based upon multiple systems
of harmony and contrast between the visual and semantic structures of their
transcribed poems.”1 Once used as tools of oral transmission, and especially in
conjunction with music, formal characteristics such as stanza structure and
rhyme now assumed concrete material form on the charta of transcription.
Proposing to integrate aspects of text as an event (personal, historical, cultural)
that transpires from the manuscript chartae with the traditional approach to a
text as discourse, Storey invited us to view these poems and their composition
more organically in their original context, and thus changed our understand-
ing of medieval poetry production.
In his own scholarly work, Storey provided many examples of this experi-
mentation with material form, which he termed “visual poetics,” chiefly by
Monte Andrea, Guittone, and Petrarch. He demonstrated that the first poets
of the Italian lyric tradition, and Monte in particular, used the graphic arrange-
ment of their literary works to enhance their poems’ content. The active
involvement of a reader/interpreter is required to comprehend the origi-
nal presentation of the poems, as expressed in a layout that is both (more)
compact and dense with abbreviations than modern editions. Starting with
Monte’s “sonetto rinterzato” Coralment’ò me stesso ’n ira (V 898), Storey dis-
cussed and refuted the modern transcription (in column form, line by line),
which creates a 25-line text, whereas in the manuscript Vaticano Latino 3793
the sonnet occupies nine continuous lines. We owe to Storey the demonstra-
tion that the original metric scheme is pivotal to transmitting Monte’s differ-
ences from Guittone and Brunetto Latini’s influence in terms of the use of
rhetoric and civic engagement, a theme that Anthony Nussmeier has picked
up in his contribution to this collection. The modern edition’s disposition of
the text emphasizes, by contrast, the metrical complexity of Monte’s devices
(broken rhymes, double rhymes), which relate to Guittone’s elaborated concep-
tion of rhetoric. Especially consequential for the field was the part of Storey’s
study that parsed through the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Petrarch’s
extreme attention to the graphic forms and visual appearance of each poem.
After Storey’s insightful analysis, we simply could not return to the old ways of
reading and understanding Petrarch and his poetic collection, marginalizing
1 H. Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric. New York: Garland,
1993, xxi.
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