Pietro Alighieri. Comentum super poema Comedie Dantis.

Cervigni, Dino S.

Pietro Alighieri. Comentum super poema Comedie Dantis. Ed. Massimiliano Chiamenti. A Critical Edition of the Third and Final Draft of Pietro Alighieri's Commentary on Dante's The Divine Comedy. Medieval and Renaissance Studies 247. Mediterranean Studies Monographs and Texts 2. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona, 2002. Pp. 722.

Pietro Alighieri is known to medievalists not just as the eldest son of Dante Alighieri; his name has come down to posterity especially for his Comentum on his father's Comedy. Unlike the work of his younger brother Jacopo--a commentary in the Italian vernacular on the Inferno--Pietro's Comentum is written in Latin and covers the entire Comedy. We are indebted to Massimiliano Chiamenti for a magisterial critical edition of the third and final draft, elegantly published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In this edition the Comentum covers pages 79-722 of the volume and is preceded by an extensive introduction, which fully justifies Chiamenti's critical method and provides all pertinent information concerning Pietro's life, the history of the text, and the editor's approach.

Following the Acknowledgements (viii), the volume begins with a list of abbreviations and scholarly works employed by the editor (ix-xii), followed by a list of the Latin works quoted by Pietro in his Comentum (xii-xxv), and finally by the secondary studies on the Comentum (xxvi-xxxiii). There follows a very extensive introduction, which provides a biography of Pietro Alighieri (1-4) and a detailed analysis of all data pertinent to every critical edition, namely: the manuscript transmission (5-24); a study of the printed editions of the Comentum (25-26); the history of the third and final draft of the Comentum (27-62); considerations on the text of the Comedy used by Pietro (63-68) and on the auctores with whom Pietro was familiar and whom he quotes in his commentary (69-76). The last two pages of the introduction explain further the editor's policy and the principles at the basis of this volume's organization (77-78).

This brief description of Chiamenti's introduction cannot render justice to the editor's painstaking editorial work. To begin with, the editor lists and describes all extant manuscripts: "Twenty-seven different manuscripts survive of Pietro Alighieri's Comentum on the Commedia, including versions translated into the vernacular and partial versions." He then classifies these twenty-seven manuscripts according to "three different groups, each belonging to one of the three versions of the Comentum" (5), which were written in three different time periods: twenty-three of these manuscripts belong to the first draft (which the editor calls [alpha]), written between 1339 and 1341 and edited and printed by V. Nannucci in 1845; the second group (called [beta]), which comprises two manuscripts, consists of "a total reworking and vast expansion of a," and "can be dated around 1344-1349 on the basis of internal references" (6-7); finally, Chiamenti describes the third version of the text (called [gamma]), the longest and definitive, dated between 1353 and 1364, consisting of two manuscripts, which Chiamenti edits "upon an integration" of both (13-14). He also dismisses "the unfortunate synoptic edition of the three drafts of Pietro's commentary on Inferno"--Il Commentarium di Pietro Alighieri nelle relazioni ashburnhamiana e ottoboniana, ed. Roberto Della Vedova and Maria Teresa Silvotti, introd. Egidio Guidubaldi, Firenze: Olschki, 1978--"rich in nothing but errors and omissions [...]" (26).

When we keep in mind what scholars knew of the manuscript tradition up to now--basically what appears in the entry on Pietro Alighieri penned by the eminent Dante scholar Francesco Mazzoni for the Enciclopedia dantesca (1970; 1984)--we can easily appreciate Chiamenti's contribution. For Mazzoni the first draft was written around 1337 and 1340 (vs. Chiamenti's 1339-41); the second around 1350-55 (vs. Chiamenti's 1344-49); and the third (for which Mazzoni quotes one manuscript), by the year 1358 (vs. Chiamenti's 1353-64. The editor also demonstrates that the title of Pietro's work is not Commentarium--as Nannucci and also Della Vedova and Silvotti entitled their editions--but rather Comentum.

The edited text lists at the bottom of the page variants of the two extant manuscripts of the third draft and identifies all the references and quotations that appear in the Comentum, thereby making it possible for the reader to appreciate fully Pietro Alighieri's hermeneutical reading of his father's masterpiece. Thus Chiamenti renders full justice to the scholars who preceded him and whom he ackowledges: e.g., F. Mazzoni and L. Rocca. And it is appropriate, in fact, to conclude this all-too-brief review quoting Mazzoni, for whom the Comentum "e il piu importante che l'antica esegesi dantesca abbia saputo dedicare alla Commedia: per la profonda conoscenza di tutto il pensiero dantesco, per l'impegnata adesione alla poetica che fu dell'Alighieri, per la dottrina filosofica e scolastica, per una fruttuosa conoscenza, ormai di prima mano, della classicita [...] assunta a instaurare e a mostrare [...] la nozione di D.[ante] lui stesso 'poeta classico' nell'ambito di una ricercata e voluta imitazione dai grandi poeti latini" ("Pietro Alighieri, Enciclopedia dantesca 1.148). In brief, Dante scholars are all too grateful to Chiamenti for editing Pietro's magisterial and affectionate commentary of his father's masterpiece.

Dino S. Cervigni, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill