Prime Indagini Per La Nuova Edizione Critica Del Dittamondo Di Fazio Degli Uberti

The aim of this article is to provide a first contribution for the new critical edition of Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo, a medieval encyclopedic poem which was last published in the mid-twentieth century. Starting with a critical and historical study dedicated to the author, the work, and the status quaestionis, this article includes a philological analysis of the previous edition and the presentation of the new recensio: the research consists of an updated census of manuscripts and printed editions of the Dittamondo, along with their descriptions; moreover, the article shows the first results of the new collatio, focused on two of the most important manuscripts, Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, S. XXVI.3 (Cm) and Verona, Biblioteca Civica, 2889 (Ve). The recognition of innovations and errors and the analysis of their quality has led to a better understanding of the copyists’ modus operandi and to the identification of significant errors (conjunctive and separative), fundamental for the following steps of the critical edition. Considering the high number of witnesses and the length of the text, this research represents the first step of a much larger work which is supposed to be collaborative in the future.