Boccaccio between Dante and Petrarch: The Chigiano Codex, Terza Rima Trilogy, and the shaping of Italian literary history (Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca)

This dissertation integrates a study of medieval manuscript culture with literary criticism, by focusing on the scribal activities of one extraordinary author and scribe, Giovanni Boccaccio. It analyzes these materials as physical witnesses to Boccaccio's lifelong attempt to negotiate his relationship with his two literary masters, Dante and Petrarch, and their relations with each other. Chapter One of the dissertation offers an historical and theoretical introduction to some major issues of philology and literary criticism and situates the case studes that follow within the burgeoning fields of Book History and Material Philology, while also considering the longer history of modern philology, from Lachmann and Bedier to Nietzsche and Pound.; Chapters Two and Three address Boccaccio's attempts to negotiate his relations with Dante and Petrarch in two manuscript collections, the Chigiano Codex and the Terza Rima Trilogy. The reading of the Chigiano codex (now Chigiano L. V. 176 and L. VI. 213) analyzes the significance of the works collected, its intended audience and the editorial strategies of format, commentary, and textual alteration which Boccaccio adopts to negotiate his relationship with his two great predecessors by joining them, along with himself, in a single volume. It is an amalgamation that literalizes the ideal literary community of Boccaccio's authorial imaginary.; Chapter Three begins with a close reading of the double presence of Dante and Petrarch in Boccaccio's first fiction, the Caccia di Diana, which is followed by a philological analysis of the connections between Boccaccio's text and Petrarch's Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade (RVF 23) that demonstrates Petrarch's knowledge of the Boccaccian work and the trilogy at the same time that most scholars date his beginning the Triumphi. This art of literary contamination that combines Dantean and Petrarchan influences in the laboratory of Boccaccio's imagination continues in the two other texts of Boccaccio's trilogy, particularly in his ironic treatment of the dream vision genre in the Amorosa visione . In the ideal space of the Chigiano codex that he assembles and by means of his Terza Rima Trilogy, Boccaccio attempts to bridge the gap between his two literary heroes.