Universitario / Lettere (n. 5) La tradizione manoscritta delle Rime di Giovan Battista Strozzi il Vecchio. Censimento dei testimoni e incipitario delle poesie

Giovan Battista Strozzi the Elder (Florence, 1505-1571) was one of the most innovative poets of the late Renaissance. He became famous for his madrigals, a poetic genre that he redefined through experiments pursued all his life. As he did not want his poems to be printed, and so favored the manuscript dissemination of his works, over time his name started to disappear from the collective memory. With the dispersion of the Strozzi family library in the eighteenth century, most of the manuscripts disappeared and the largest part of his poetic production was considered to have been lost forever.
 
This book aims at laying the grounds for a future critical edition of Strozzi's complete poems, thereby re-establishing the importance of his legacy in the history of Italian and European lyric poetry. It contains a census and full description of all manuscript traditions of Strozzi the Elder's poems, followed by the alphabetical inventory of the first verse of more than 3000 poems, mostly madrigals, half of which have been found for the first time in the course of this research.
 
The manuscript corpus herein contained was formed through an analysis of all the literature, old and new, concerning Strozzi, and all the catalogues of manuscript collections available in print or online. All the manuscripts were then examined autoptically (in person) in their respective libraries. The corpus consists of 120 manuscripts, most of which date back to the sixteenth century. Of these, 60 have been discovered and described here for the first time. 42 are ‘monographic’, i.e. entirely devoted to Strozzi's poems: such a high number of manuscripts devoted to one poet only is almost unheard of, and shows the prestige Strozzi enjoyed in his times. During the catalogue research the manuscripts that belonged to the Strozzi family also resurfaced. These consist in large codices that contain Strozzi's poetic corpus in its complete form, allowing us to fill in all the gaps in our knowledge of his poetry. The result is that we now know more than 3000 poems that can be attributed to Strozzi the Elder, three times more than what was previously known.
 
This book is divided into two main parts, which are preceded by an introduction with an explanation of the research methods adopted, followed by extensive indexes. The first part of the book consists in the census and full description of the 120 manuscripts, which are examined both externally and internally, using both the codicological and the cultural approach. A complete bibliography of all the manuscripts described is provided. The second part consists in a comprehensive inventory of the first verse of Strozzi's poems, complete with references to all the manuscripts in which they are contained (with page / folium number).
 
With the new data offered by this census, future scholars will be able to approach Strozzi the Elder's poems from a new perspective, allowing them to achieve a fuller understanding and recognition of his importance in the history of Italian and European literature.
 

(Written by Lorenzo Amato, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2020)