Leone Orsini e il manoscritto “Italien 1535” della Bibliothèque nationale de France

This thesis consists of a study and an edition of a poetry collection, or canzoniere, compiled by the sixteenth-century Roman poet and prelate Leone Orsini (1512-1564). The canzoniere is composed of 198 poems. There are no printed editions of this canzoniere, and, even more remarkably, it survives in only a single vellum manuscript copy which is held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and is catalogued “Italien 1535.” The absence of the author’s name as well as a title and a colophon might explain why the manuscript has been misidentified and in the library catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale it is still incorrectly attributed to the Florentine Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556), one of Orsini’s colleagues in the “Accademia degli Infiammati” of Padua. Very little has been written about Leone Orsini’s canzoniere. In fact, there is only one published article that deals with the Paris manuscript, Francesco Flamini’s “Il canzoniere inedito di Leone Orsini” (1901). In it the author identifies, for the first time, Leone Orsini as the author of the canzoniere. This lack of attention to Orsini is surprising when we consider that he was a figure well worthy of finding a place among contemporary eminent poets and prelates such as Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), Giovanni Guidiccioni (1480-1541), and Giovanni Della Casa (1503-1556). The first part of this thesis analyses the manuscript in detail, reconstructs the story of its development, and includes illustrations of it. It then explores Orsini’s life and tackles the problem of the attribution of the manuscript. Based on a thorough analysis of the 198 poems, new evidence of Orsini’s authorship is offered. This is followed by the explanation of the purpose of the manuscript, a description of the structure and of the style of the canzoniere and of the characters cited in the poems. The second part of the thesis provides an annotated edition of the canzoniere based on the only extant codex. This thesis thus brings important new information to light on the contributions that Leone Orsini made to Italian culture and literature and, more generally, to Petrarchism in Europe in early modern period.Ph