> ad 2. I think any parallel would be tenuous between John and Dante.
>No entry for J of S in the ENCICLOPEDIA DANTESCA suggests such a parallel
>has not been drawn, or at least has disappeared into obscurity. Don't know
>if you looked in my 1998 commentary on the MONARCHIA, but don't bother - no
>J of S there, either. Are there any mss of John's work known to have been
>in Italy, saec. xiii-xiv? Kristeller's Iter Italicum might help to answer
this.
Dear Skip,
Please forgive that my comments are a bit hurried and vague, but there are
so many other things that I am supposed to do at this very moment so that I
cannot check anything except my own old and insufficient notes:
1) I think that you are right to point out the problem of manuscript
evidence, and that I should have phrased my own reply to David a bit more
cautiously. I cannot check this at the moment, but J. A. Giles in 1848
(reprinted by Migne, PL 199) used only one single Canterbury MS for the
_Polycraticus_ (and mentioned that earlier prints of this work seem to
depend on different MSS), and as I recall it the situation was still the
same or at least not much different when Clemens Web edited the
_Polycraticus_ in 1909. At the time when I took my notes, K. S. B.
Keats-Rohan had not yet begun to publish his edition in the _Corpus
Christianorum, Continuatio medievalis_ (118, 1996), and I have not checked
it in the meantime, but maybe this is the place where David would want to
start if he is interested to get more recent info on the extant
manuscripts. However, a work like the _Polycraticus_, especially its
moralizing and anecdotic materials (although they are not what David is
primarily interested in), is not unlikely to have been excerpted into
secondary compilations and florilegia, and so we might also have to
consider and investigate the possibility of intermediary sources for Dante.
This is where I should have phrased my earlier comments more cautiously:
there is a sort of scholarly consensus that the the _Polycraticus_ has left
traces of its influence in the Commedia, but maybe there is not or -- at
the current state of Dante scholarship -- should not be a consensus that
Dante knew this work directly and in its complete form. Btw, when
investigating manuscript diffusion in its relevance or irrelevance for
Dante, I would not necessarily confine interest to Italy, but would also
include -- although I don't want to open another can of worms, at least not
right now -- France.
2) I am surprised and did not know that John of Salisbury has no entry in
the ED, as you say. But in this case such an omission should rather teach
us that even the ED does not always represent the state of research
sufficiently well. Even if it should turn out that the current consensus
(or what I had described as such, because I am not aware that it has met
with substantial opposition or confutation) can be invalidated, there
certainly should be an entry for John, even if only for telling D's
commentators that they should modify their consensus. There is a
significant amount of publications on the presumed influence on Dante
(Pezard 1948-49, Renucci 1951, Mills Chiarenza 1983, as quoted in my
earlier note) and a far bigger number of less specific Dante publications
where the Polycraticus is quoted with further parallels, and in the time
after Renucci's thesis (1951) you will rarely find a gloss on Thais in Inf.
18 where the Polycraticus (cf. 3,4 and 8,3) is not mentioned as one of D's
likely sources (but see Massimiliano Chiamenti's doubts expressed in his
_Dante traduttore_, Firenze: Le Lettere, 1995, p.157, n.367). The
intertextual parallels may still be tenuous, but they certainly have played
their role in modern Dante scholarship, even if this did not leave a trace
in the ED.
3) Apart from the _Polycraticus_, also other writings of this author might
deserve attention. I once occasionally noted, for instance, "rei familiaris
angustia" in his autobiographical account _Metalogicon_ 2,10 as a possible
parallel for "urget enim me rei familiaris angustia" in Dante's (if it is
really Dante's) Epistle to Cangrande (Ep 13,88), but I did not verify
possible precedents in common classical or medieval models and took my note
only out of despair that Brugnoli and more recently Cecchini have nothing
to adduce and to discuss for Ep 13,88 except D'Ovidio's highly personal and
therefore only so mildly interesting observation that Dante himself would
never have written this passage.
Best regards,
Otfried
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