ABSTRACT
The Teseida is the earliest of Boccaccio’s texts considered at length in this study. Scholars are in agreement that it was composed during Boccaccio’s youth in Naples, and shortly before he returned to Florence between the winter of 1340 and spring of 1341.1 There is one extant autograph of the text, which dates from shortly after its composition and/or publication, possibly during the late 1340s, but more probably during the 1350s.2 Following the identification of this autograph copy in the 1930s, Salvatore Battaglia published an edition for which he studied the textual relationship between approximately thirty manuscripts, proposing that they descended from the autograph, but should be divided into two families, each with two subsets.3 The most recent scholarship on the subject has been carried out by William Coleman, who takes issue with Battaglia’s model and proposes a new stemma, centred on three redactions.4 According to this schema, the majority of extant manuscripts belong to the first redaction, which itself is divided into subsets alpha, beta and gamma, with the alpha group divided further. This redaction is not descended from the original autograph, but should be ‘understood as a gradual process of composition whereby Boccaccio produced a series of authoritative, related versions of the text. During this period the poem achieved its final form, but Boccaccio continued to accumulate the material for the glosses’.5 The second and third redactions are witnessed only by the extant autograph, and a missing autograph, from which only one extant manuscript descends: Naples, Biblioteca Oratoriana del Monumento Nazionale dei Girolomini, MS C. F. 2. 8 (known as MS NO). Coleman is not willing to hazard which of these latter redactions came first, and places both the autograph and antigraph to NO (NO1) on an equal level. From this revised version of the stemma it is clear that none of the extant manuscripts derived their text from the extant autograph, and therefore it is not likely either that their copyists were inf luenced directly by the autograph’s presentation, although it remains useful to ascertain the extent to which scribes deviated from or followed Boccaccio’s design.
