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I documenti d'Amore [Documenta Amoris] by Francesco da Barberino, Marco Albertazzi

2010; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 105; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mlr.2010.0270

2222-4319

John C. Barnes,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

MLR, 105.2, 2010 573 I documenti d'Amore [Documenta Amoris]. By Francesco da Barberino. Ed. by Marco Albertazzi. 2 vols. Lavis (Trento): La Finestra. 2008. xlvii+450 pp. (vol. 1); 602 pp. (vol. 11). 100 (vol. 1); 140 (vol. 11). ISBN 978-88-95925 04-2 (vol. 1); 978-88-95925-05-9 (vol. 11). ISSN 1973-123X. Francesco da Barberino's idiosyncratic Documenti d'Amore ('Teachings of Love', understood in a very broad sense), completed around 1314, is a landmark in the history of the book, consisting of four interlocking elements: a vernacular verse text of 7,018 lines in variable metre (though mainly hendecasyllables and hepta syllables); a Latin prose paraphrase of that text; a huge Latin prose commentary, which Marco Albertazzi (1,viii) calls 'uno dei phi straordinari zibaldoni del sapere medievale' (typically the verse gives precepts for acceptable behaviour while the commentary amplifies themwith exempla from lifeand literature); and what were originally thirty-oneminiatures. The whole design was firmly under Francesco's control and conspicuously integrated (there are, for instance, references to the commentary in the central text): not only is Francesco the author of all three tex tual components, he also made a good job of preliminary coloured drawings for the illuminator towork from.Moreover, he transcribed the vernacular text,and more, himself?more than once. Two partly autograph manuscripts survive, in both of which the vernacular verse is indeed the central text, in that itoccupies the central area of the page. In what appears to be the final copy (A) the Latin paraphrase immediately surrounds it,and is in its turn surrounded by the commentary. Such a use of thewriting surface creates a particular problem for themodern editor.Until now there has been only one complete edition, prepared by Francesco Egidi and published in fourvolumes between 1905 and 1927 (ithas been reprinted, most recently byArche-PiZeta in 2006). Egidi's solution was to include the thirty one miniatures as woodcuts and to divide the page into four zones one below the other, with the vernacular text at the top, the commentary in the third zone and variants at the bottom. His edition was semi-diplomatic, in that itreproduced MS A without altering the punctuation, the case of the letters,or theword divisions (e.g. etanto iscresce lonor di costei': line 2443), but resolving abbreviations, stan dardizing the use of u and v, and doing away with long 5.The finished product was full ofmisreadings and other errors: byAlbertazzi's count (1,xiv) over a thousand abbreviations were wrongly expanded. A critical edition was expected fromMaria Cristina Panzera, who published impressive preparatory work in 1994 ('Per l'edizione critica dei Documenti d'Amore di Francesco da Barberino', Studi mediolatini e volgari, 40 (1994), 91-118); now, however, the need ismet by a prolific Paris-based scholar with his own publishing house. Albertazzi modernizes the spelling to the same limited extent as Egidi, as well as replacing j and y with iwhere appropriate; he divides the words in accordance with modern practice (indicating separations with a full stop after the space) and uses initial capital letters,punctuation, and diacritic signs as they are commonly used today, though preserving c on account of its ambiguity. He also corrects many of Egidi's readings of themanuscripts (B being used where A is 574 Reviews defective or illegible, while C, which, as Panzera showed, may contain authorial revisions, isdismissed), and makes something of a speciality of emending the non autograph parts of themanuscripts themselves by identifying the sources of the authors quotations. Francesco was widely read and inhis commentary constantly quotes writers such as Aristotle, Livy, St Isidore, Guillaume de Conches, Alain de lisle, and Vincent de Beauvais, as well as the Bible, theChurch Fathers, the legal corpora, and poets both Italian and Provencal, though he often leaves his source unidentified; the good detective Albertazzi shows, for example, thatEgidi's 'Popule meus, qui te ducunt ipsi te decipiunt' should be 'Popule meus, qui te [beatum] dicunt, ipsi tedecipiunt' (Isaiah 3.12). The edition includes excellent photographic reproductions of eighteen of the twenty-seven folios ofMS A that accommodate surviving miniatures (and the rest of theminiatures, as well as...