From Fragment to Icon: The Tradition of Dante's Convivio

Dr. Arduini’s study of the diffusion and reception of the Convivio traces how the ideological transformation of works is reflected in their material manifestations, in the Convivio’s case in the 15th-century manuscript tradition, in which the work appears alone or coupled with other texts, in its 1490 first edition, and in its three subsequent 16th-century reprints. How did the Convivio move from being a rough draft abandoned by the poet in 1307 to being one of Dante’s canonical texts of the late 15th century, associated with Dante’s collection of canzoni established by Boccaccio? Dante’s abandonment of the work and the seeming oblivion into which it falls in the 14th-century had deep repercussions in the Convivio’s problematic textual conditions. The critical implications of the use of a work abandoned by its author, and then revived and edited by admirers a century later, led eventually to numerous manipulations of the text.

Beatrice Arduini (University of Washington, French & Italian Studies) centers her work on Medieval Italian literature and Dante Studies, particularly on manuscript culture. She is currently working on her book project, The Invention of Dante's Convivio, which examines the tradition of Dante's unfinished treatise in manuscripts and early printed editions. Professor Arduini's projects include the analysis of Giovanni Boccaccio's activity as copyist and editor of Dante's works, in particular the Rime, and the study of the conditions of writing and transcribing in prison in the Florentine Middle Ages. She has published on these and other topics in Romance Philology, Textual Cultures, Medioevo Letterario d'Italia, Dante Studies and Medioevo e Rinascimento. Recently, she contributed with a chapter for Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity and Appropriation.

Her research and teaching interests also include Early Italian and Occitan Literature and the development of the song collection genre (canzonieri) in order to investigate how the material form of texts crucially determines their meanings.