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Hosted by: SIMS and Kislak Center
This talk offers a reflection on the interactions between textuality and materiality, message and medium, visual-verbal discourse and its physical support through readings of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida and Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Each of these texts is read as an interaction between conceptual, linguistic, rhetorical, and material elements. In a manuscript poetics, the container and the content, the book and the text, share a material and symbolic solidarity. The book represents the primary idea of the text, and the text, conceptually, assumes the material shape of a book. A manuscript poetics informed the Teseida and the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta: operating within the manuscript culture of late medieval Italy, Boccaccio and Petrarca evaluated and deployed the tools and strategies of scribal culture to shape, signal, and layer meanings coextensive to those they conveyed verbally in their written texts.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Online Lecture Series presents regularly scheduled lectures related to the study of premodern manuscript books and global manuscript culture.
Francesco Marco Aresu is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics and metricology, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi and is an editor for the Petrarchive and associate editor for Heliotropia. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, was published in 2023. Before joining the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.
Featured Image: Detail of a page from a late 15th-century manuscript copy of Boccaccio's Teseide (UPenn MS Codex 257, fol. 4r [=1r] )