About this edition

This web site contains high-resolution full colour digital images and highly-detailed transcriptions of two key early manuscripts of Boccaccio’s Teseida: Boccaccio's own autograph (AUT), Laurenziana Acquisti e Doni 325 in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and the copy (NO) of a lost beta autograph composed by Boccaccio after he wrote AUT, cod CF.2.6 in the Biblioteca Statale Oratoriana dei Girolamini, Naples. For a full account of these two manuscripts and their relationships both to each other and to other copies of Teseida, see our critical edition of Giovanni Boccaccio. Teseida. Delle Nozze d'Emilia, Firenze, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2015.

This digital edition fulfills the promise made on page xxvi of the 2015 printed edition: '[it] will provide a photograph of each page of the two manuscripts with a literal, facing page transcription of each page.' In addition, the digital edition provides for every one of the stanzas in Boccaccio's poem a word-by-word original spelling comparison of our edition and the transcriptions of the two manuscripts, with all substantive variants (as opposed to orthographic variants) marked. The digital edition also contains a search tool, offering keyword-in-context presentation of every occurrence of every word searched in the text. The search tool used is the StaticSearch system created by Martin Holmes and Joey Takeda for the Endings project.

The idea for this digital edition arose when the editors took part in a two-week workshop at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre in 2003, as part of a team collating seven manuscripts and two print editions of Dante's Commedia, now published online in Prue Shaw's second edition. The editors there met Peter Robinson, whose software and thinking about digital editions underlie this edition. Barbara Bordalejo devised the encoding system used in the digital transcriptions while Andrew West produced early prototypes of the digital edition. Francesca Galligan joined Peter, Barbara and ourselves in Pacentro, Abruzzo for an intensive two-week period in 2005, in which we created the entire collation of the edition and the two manuscripts underlying this digital edition. The editors express their thanks to all three, and particularly to Peter Robinson who, finally, brought this edition to the web. We also thank Lino Leonardi, our publisher of the print edition and co-publisher of the digital edition, for his help in making the images available and for his unfailing support over many years.

The editors wish to thank the libraries and institutions listed below for their collaboration in the project.