Textual Criticism in Italy

Abstract

The article explains the path of Italian philology throughout the 20th century, based on the studies of the three great philologists Joseph Bédier, Giorgio Pasquali and Gianfranco Contini. It was with them that the art of critical editions lost the almost metaphysical abstraction that had characterized it during the predominant phase of Lachmann's school. To get to the situation of the last thirty years, the two most important points of the activity of Italian philologists -even at a theoretical level- are the following. On the one hand, the detailed studied of the carácter and vicissitudes of the most important textual traditions and of the individual manuscripts that make up each of these traditions. On the other hand, the research on the interaction between the way in which the author proceeds to a text and the work of the copyists of the text itself. The aim of the essay is not to trace an analytical and exhaustive panorama of the developments of Italian philological criticism, but rather to highlight the main problematic questions that have characterized Italian philology.