Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Vittoria BRANCATO

We still lack nowadays a modern, critical and commented edition of the entire poetical corpus of Guittone D'Arezzo. This gap concerns one of the most important personalities of the Italian Poetry of the Middle Ages, which has been considered obscure, and condemned – especially by the auctoritas of Dante in De Vulgari Eloquentia –, if not to oblivion, at least to unpopularity. After two editions, the first, exhaustive, by Lodovico Valeriani (1828), and the second, restricted to love poetry, by Flaminio Pellegrini (1901), the edition by Francesco Egidi (1940) establishes a vulgata, but cannot still be considered as a really critical one. The review by Gianfranco Contini (1941) has defined the guiding principles for a future critical edition. My research is dedicated to the less known and more “unlucky” part of the poetical production of Guittone, his moral and philosophical poetry, written after the poet's conversion and enrollment in the order of Frati Gaudenti (around 1265). His moral poetry is central to the poet himself, but negligible in the larger context of the lirica italiana, later dominated by the Stil Novo's revolution. The corpus analysed in this work is composed by 20 canzoni consered in four manuscripts of the XIIIth century: Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 3793; Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Laurenziano Redi 9; Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 217; Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ricc. 2533. The thesis examines a series of issues that needed to be studied, in particular those connected to the relationship between the manuscripts and the hypothesis that the sequence of texts in the Laurenziano manuscript could be attributed to Guittone himself. The edition is completed by a commentary trying to explain the meaning of every "canzone", aiming to resolve the problem of Guittone's obscuritas (the "canzoni" are followed by an accurate “translation” into modern Italian) and to define not only his role in the XIIIth century, his sources and his cultural and literary background, but also to study the influence of his ethical production on the following poets. The commentary further examines the level of recantation in his later work of the love poems, later regretted and rejected by Guittone himself. This critical edition of the canzoni morali finally allows an examination of their metrical peculiarities in relation to the "canzoni d'amore", as well as it contributes to explore the relationship between the structure of the “canzone” in Guittone and Dante.