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  1. Discover
  2. Paper: Dante's Lyric Poetry in Oxford
  3. Unit: Early Printed Editions (1491-1727)

The First Printed Edition of the Vita Nuova, 1576

External links

One of the sources used for this edition, MS Laurenziano 40.42
One of the copies of Boccaccio's Dantean edition (MS Chig. L V 176)

Related sources

Image for MS Can. Ital. 114, fol. 33v

Commentary

The First Printed Edition of the Vita Nuova, 1576
Vita nuova di Dante Alighieri. Con xv Canzoni del medesimo. E la vita di esso Dante scritta da Giovanni Boccaccio. Firenze, Sermartelli, 1576.

[8], 116, [6], 3-80 p.; 8vo
USTC 808799 (https://www.ustc.ac.uk/editions/808799)

Dante’s lyric poetry did not enjoy the same extensive success of Petrarch’s lyric collection, the Canzoniere. Nevertheless, Dante’s poems were printed five times between 1491 and 1532. His Vita nuova (New Life), on the other hand, had to wait until 1576 to be printed. In this prosimetrum Dante gathered 31 of his poems, accompanying the verse with his own prose commentary. The 1576 Sermartelli edition gathers the New Life, the series of 15 canzoni (long lyric poems) that became famous following the manuscript edition of Giovanni Boccaccio (1350s-1360s), and Boccaccio’s Life of Dante, written to introduce this same edition. Sermartelli based his edition on Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS 40.42, and therefore left out the divisioni, the technical part of the prose commentary, which was already missing in that source.