The present edition

The present critical edition is based on the autograph of the Teseida in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, that was copied by Boccaccio c. 1348-1350 and revised by the author during the following decade. Although Aut finally provided a reliable, authoritative copy of the Teseida, the manuscript presents editors with a variety of challenges: it has suffered water-spotting, text lost when the manuscript was trimmed during a later rebinding, the loss of a folio containing 80 lines of poetry plus an uncertain number of glosses, and over-tracing by a later scribe (C3) with an inelegant hand and an often inaccurate eye.

The editorial project has also benefited from the recent identification of NO, a mid-15th century beta copy of the Teseida, the manuscript descended from a lost autograph that Boccaccio composed some time after he produced Aut. The manuscript has a variant text of the poem and offers in some ways a more sophisticated treatment of the drawings, parafs, and, glosses than that in Aut. In several instances where text had been trimmed from Aut or where it was not possible to recapture faded text, NO has served in recovering and reconstructing the lost Aut readings.