Prolegomena to the new edition of Francesco da Buti’s commentary on Dante’s Commedia. Purgatorio

In this article I discuss the relationships between the extant manuscript tradition of Francesco da Buti’s commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio. My argument shows that the constitutio textus cannot be arrived at in a mechanical way, owing to the numerous contaminations and interpolations. I thus offer some general methodological reflections on how to critically edit a long prose text whose MSS tradition is densely contaminated. With this in mind I make the case that the most appropriate way to approach the making of the edition is to base the text on a single authoritative manuscript