ABSTRACT
Vittore Branca’s research on the manuscript tradition of the Decameron and his thesis regarding merchant readership have been fundamental in focusing critical attention on the ‘non-traditional’ or ‘extra-literary’ transmission of Boccaccio’s texts.1 No less crucially, his work has increased awareness of the pivotal importance of the relationship between readership and codicological evidence in the context of the Decameron. Until recently, Branca’s descriptions of Decameron manuscripts were the most complete and detailed available, although they were compiled with primarily philological rather than bibliographical aims in mind, and by his own admission ‘senza eccessive preoccupazioni di uniformità e schematicità assolute’.2 In 1998, Marco Cursi published a long article intended to address precisely this lack of palaeographical and codicological rigour with his own bibliographical descriptions, which placed a greater emphasis on material evidence, and a series of case studies highlighting largely palaeographical concerns.3 This research was updated and expanded in a monograph (2007), in which detailed investigations of the manuscript witnesses continue to provide the raw material for a study of the conditions and environments in which copies of the Decameron were produced.4
