Prolegomena a una nuova edizione critica delle opere volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva

Abstract Our perception of the vernacular works of Bonvesin da la Riva is still largely shaped by the editions of Gianfranco Contini (1941 and 1960). A reassessment of Bonvesin in terms of language and literary history can only start from a reflection on the textual basis of his works. The high quality of the Berlin manuscript (ca. 1300), which contains about half of Bonvesin’s oeuvre, is undisputed. However, the “retranslation” of the texts contained exclusively in later manuscripts which converts them into the form of the codex optimus, as still practised by Gökçen (2001), seems unacceptable today. Rather, the aim should be to identify different linguistic, stylistic and textual tendencies of the individual works by making recourse to the entire textual tradition. In this context, the assumption of an absolutely regular metrical form of the alexandrine, which has been advocated since Salvioni and Contini, is becoming increasingly questionable. It is suggested that Bonvesin’s poetry should be considered in the light of the tradition of anisosyllabism, which was well attested in the 13th century. The hypothesis of a “dialectal authenticity” of Bonvesin’s language is also problematic. Rather, an edition must preserve the constitutive polymorphism of the medieval scripta. Overall, the aim must be to recognise the distinctive personality of the medieval poet in the heterogeneity and variability of the surviving texts, beyond anachronistic expectations of a “classic”.