A text in progress

Most editions aspire to present a version of a text that represents the author’s ultimate intentions concerning the work. The scholarship on Boccaccio’s works, however, continues to provide evidence that the poet was continually concerned with re-casting, re-writing, and re-composing his works. For such writers, the prospect of a final edition expressing an author’s ultimate intentions is impossible. Since this seems to be the case with Boccaccio, the present edition will serve to remind readers and scholars that an edition of the “ultimate” Teseida, the “final intention” Teseida, is not possible and, perhaps, not desirable.

This edition of the Teseida represents Boccaccio’s epic during the decade of the 1350s, which began with his copying Aut, text and glosses. The process continued through a series of revisions and additions by Boccaccio that occurred during the rest of the decade and beyond. Instead of considering Aut as a final product, we would argue that it reveals a process: the development of the Teseida from the late 1340s to c. 1360. That process, of course, continued.

As NO demonstrates, after first composing, then embellishing and revising the alpha form of the Teseida, Boccaccio’s interests subsequently seem to have changed in the direction of a beta form of the epic. For scholars interested in the beta form of the Teseida represented by NO, we have included appendices comparing the drawings/drawing spaces, the parafs, and the glosses in both man- uscripts and indicating the substantial variants in the poem and glosses of each.This information is presented in the six appendices to the edition, which will permit readers to evaluate the evolution of the Teseida after the composition of the Laurentian Library autograph.

Aut represents a point in Boccaccio’s continued involvement with the Teseida and it provides us with a very clear understanding of the master’s continuing revisions of the text. Despite its occasional flaws, Aut is the best surviving copy of his epic. For these reasons and, only barring the highly unlikely discovery of a more perfect autograph, it remains the pre-eminent witness to the poet’s intentions and to his working habits.