




































Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 3.1 (2013) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/HSDA.3.1.3086 
 

 

 

 

  17 

Petrarch’s Early Manuscripts and Incunabula in the 

Oregon Petrarch Open Book 

Massimo Lollini, University of Oregon 

Abstract. Working from transcriptions generated through the T-PEN 
program at St. Louis University, the collaborators of the project 
“Petrarch’s Early Manuscripts and Incunabula in the Oregon Petrarch 
Open Book (OPOB)” are presently digitizing and encoding in TEI P5 
two key interpretative copies of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium 
fragmenta: the late fourteenth-century manuscript copy from the 
Queriniana Library in Brescia, D II 21, and the Queriniana Library’s 
copy of the first printed edition (editio princeps) of the Rerum 
vulgarium fragmenta edited presumably by Cristoforo [Berardi?] and 
published by Vindelin de Speier (Spira) in Venice in 1470. The first 
part of the article traces a brief history of the Oregon Petrarch 
Open Book and the last section introduces a future project, “Texts, 
Images and Interpretation in the OPOB.” 

The Oregon Petrarch Open Book 

     The Oregon Petrarch Open Book (OPOB) is a working repository-hypertext 
in and around Francis Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or Collection of 
Fragments in Vernacular (also known as the Canzoniere). The original title given 
by Petrarch to his collection of poems literally translates Fragments of scattered 
things in vernacular; it conveys the idea of an ongoing project that in taking 
shape and form maintains a fragmentary, uncertain, and open nature. Using open 
source software, we are building a flexible and comprehensive structure of digital 
assets that promotes innovative research, preservation, and pedagogy, based on 
international collaboration among scholars and institutions, and continues Petrarch’s 
model of an open, evolving, and unfinished work. 

     This project started in 2003 with the goal of deepening our understanding 
of the future of the book in the context of digital scholarship. It was seen as a 
critical opportunity to integrate different technologies and resources stretching from 
manuscript, to book culture, up to late print culture. Since its inception, the 
project has been particularly interested in taking advantage of digital technology 

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to create new conditions to study and teach Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium 
fragmenta (henceforth, Rvf) through its evolution and afterlife in translations, 
rewritings, and intersemiotic transpositions. The open book idea presents this 
central work of world literature as an ongoing project, not as a finished product. 
Thus, the OPOB shares the idea that digital technology favors a movement 
“away from the notion of a single-text ‘definitive edition’” (Finneran). The project 
aims to provide multiple versions of the Rvf in different formats, being aware 
that a special concern with versioning is a distinctive feature of contemporary 
editing (Bryant). 

     The Canzoniere is the perfect text for designing a system around the 
idea of the open book. Not only is it the most influential collection of poetry in 
the European tradition, but it is constructively and profitably read as a work-in-
progress and as an unfinished text; Petrarch continued to produce different 
versions of his collection and shift the order of the poems until his death in 
1374. Roland Greene sees in Petrarch’s Canzoniere the founding moment of 
Western lyric sequence that influenced the lyrical discourse not only of European 
poets but also of North American and Latin American poets such as Walt 
Whitman and Pablo Neruda. It is not by chance that an important digital 
humanities project such as “The Whitman Archive” has encountered problems 
similar to those that the OPOB is facing: representing the unfinished and 
evolving nature of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which like the Rvf may be read 
as a work-in-progress, an unfinished text that, in the context of nineteenth-century 
print culture, underwent continual addition, revision, and reordering throughout the 
poet’s life. 

     In 2010 the OPOB received a Digital Humanities Start-up Level II 
fellowship. This grant triggered collaboration with Web designer Travis Shea and 
the University of Oregon Libraries, making available new versions of Petrarch’s 
Rvf in digital format, from the diplomatic edition prepared by Ettore Modigliani in 
1904 – a transcription of the manuscript Vatican Latin 3195, on which Petrarch 
was still working at the time of his death – to the most recent critical edition 
prepared by Giuseppe Savoca (2008). Other important resources have been 
included, such as Alessandro Vellutello’s 1525 commentary of the Rvf and the 
complete 1555 French translation by Vasquin Philieul. Finally, the OPOB was 
able to develop an international collaboration, involving among others Ennio 
Ferraglio, director of the Queriniana Italian Library in Brescia, who gave to the 
project permission to use digital copies of one important early manuscript of the 
Rvf (Codex Queriniano D II 21) and the earliest incunabulum of the Rvf 
(Queriniano G V 15) from the library. We also worked with Peter Kuon 
(University of Salzburg), Paola Vecchi Galli (University of Bologna) and, for a 
short period, Wayne Storey (Indiana University). 



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     During the NEH grant period, we enhanced the functionality of the 
existing database software and of specific tools, such as “Compare poems and 
assets,” by providing multiple moveable containers of selectable content, text, 
images, audio or video. The OPOB encourages an active and polyphonic 
reading; allowing different platforms of critical attention by using the link Compare 
poems and assets in the upper right of the screen: 

 

 

 

The user may compare multiple versions of the original text in Italian, for 
example the Modigliani Diplomatic Edition and the recent critical edition prepared 
by Giuseppe Savoca: 

http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/users/maxiloll#overlay=multi-compare
http://petrarch.uoregon.edu/users/maxiloll#overlay=multi-compare


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 The user may choose one of the texts of the RVF and then add elements 
of the Apparatus to compare different translations: 

 

 

Or to consult paraphrases, summaries and tweets: 

 



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One can access an important commentary, Vellutello’s Le volgari opere del 
Petrarcha con l'esposizione di Alessandro Vellutello (1525): 

 

Or see archives (visual, audio, and textual) related to specific poems: 



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     The Digital Humanities Start-up Level II grant was instrumental in 
supporting an upgrade to the website infrastructure using the latest version (7) of 
the open source Content Management System, Drupal. Thanks to the 
collaboration of Karen Estlund, Head of the Digital Scholarship Center at the 
University of Oregon, we were able to link the OPOB site to the UO Libraries’ 
digital repository: https://oregondigital.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/petrarch 

     Tools were applied to the text images included in the repository that 
allow the user to zoom and pan around within a window in order to make 
comparisons to other content more accessible. The texts of the library repository 
are now linked to the OPOB and at the same time have been made available 
for anyone to access and use for research. The metadata is also available via 
the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, making the texts 
available to be re-used in other projects.  

     The new site of the OPOB was officially made available to the public at 
the end of October 2011. We call OPOB the open-book initiative, partly in 
homage to the open-source software movement whose tools we are using 
(Drupal, PHP, MySQL, XTF, shared-canvas), and partly in reference to the way 
computer-mediated communication technology and online professional networking 
has opened up new ways of building academic communities to learn and 
collaborate. But mostly we call it “open” because our approach articulates new 
interdisciplinary paths for reading and learning in the Romance languages and 
literatures, comparative literature, linguistics, and translation studies. Given the 
importance of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in the formation of modern Western lyric 
discourse, only a richly annotated hypertextual approach can do justice to the 

https://oregondigital.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/petrarch


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complexity and richness of the cross-cultural and interlingual connections involved 
in the phenomenon of Petrarchism.  

      As mentioned above, the new site includes the most recent critical 
edition of Petrarch’s Canzoniere prepared by Giuseppe Savoca. This edition is 
different from all previous editions and arguably the most innovative in its 
editorial decisions, made possible by the use of digital technology and ultraviolet 
analysis. Most innovations are related to punctuation. For instance, the 
interpretation of sonnet 179 changes in the new edition because of a virgula at 
the end of a verse. Preparation of the edition involved approaching the 
Canzoniere with a view to establishing concordances/correlations among all 
aspects of its “lexicon” (literally lexical, graphemic, and visual). Savoca holds that 
his use of computer technology, both on the lexical level and in the treatment 
of images, made the difference with respect to the traditional philological 
approach, both in analysis and in the properly editorial phase. Proceeding by 
concordance/correlation implies that, before making any editorial decision, one 
must compare all analogous elements of the work and be aware of the received 
philological tradition. Savoca is convinced that today only computational analysis 
can provide a scientific basis for our textual analyses. Digital treatment of a text, 
he writes, allows us to move from the syntagm to the paradigm; that is, it puts 
us in contact with the system specific to the text that we wish to understand 
and publish. Nonetheless, Savoca is aware that “the philology of a text is a 
continuously open technical and cognitive process” and that, as a consequence, 
the hermeneutic task of the interpreter is inexhaustible and should always be 
philologically oriented (vii). 

     Philology is the master key of the OPOB that takes us one step further 
toward the computer-assisted reconstruction of the text envisioned by Savoca. 
This is done through the creation of a hypertext that aims at documenting the 
historical evolution of the Canzoniere from manuscript culture to print and digital 
culture. From this perspective, all editions of the Canzoniere previous to Savoca’s 
maintain their value and utility as a witness to the multiple lives of the text and 
its reception and translations. For this reason, we decided to keep in our 
hypertext the previous critical edition prepared by Contini. In the OPOB it is 
possible to switch from one edition to the other using the following, drop-down 
menu: 



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Transcribing and Encoding Codex Queriniano D II 21 and Incunabulum 

Queriniano G V 15 

     Having built a solid infrastructure and productive collaborative ties with 
local, national, and international colleagues, the OPOB decided to pursue further 
collaborative exchange and interoperability by implementing TEI (Text Encoding 
Initiative) encoding in key digital assets of the OPOB. In fact, the TEI has 
become an essential component of e-philology, not only by developing an 
interchange language that allows scholars to exchange information but also by 
developing a new data description language that improves the ability to describe 
textual features. In 2012 we received an American Council of Learned Societies 
Digital Innovation grant (ACLS) for the collaborative project “Petrarch’s Early 
Manuscripts and Incunabula in the Oregon Petrarch Open Book.” This project is 
an open source, open access initiative designed for students, scholars, teachers, 
and translators to read and investigate selected manuscripts and early printed 
editions of Petrarch’s magnum opus that have been instrumental to its 
interpretation from its first release in 1362 until today. Working from transcriptions 
generated through the T-PEN program at St. Louis University (Transcription for 
Paleographical and Editorial Notation), the collaborators of the project are 
presently digitizing and encoding in TEI P5 two key interpretative copies of 
Petrarch’s Rvf: the late fourteenth-century manuscript copy from the Queriniana 
Library in Brescia, D II 21, and the Queriniana Library’s copy of the first printed 
edition (editio princeps) of the Rvf edited by Cristoforo [Berardi?] and published 
by Vindelin de Speier (Spira) in Venice in 1470.  

     The encoding of the transcriptions utilizes standard TEI P5 modules to 
produce schemas in DTD, W3C, and Relax NG formats. Additional validation will 
be performed by a Schematron schema. Massimo Lollini is leading the 
transcription, encoding, and testing processes; his team include as collaborators 
and consultants: 1) Karen Estlund, Head, Digital Scholarship Center, UO Libraries; 



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2) John Russell, Scholarly Communications Librarian, UO Libraries; 3) Giuseppe 
Savoca, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature at the University 
of Catania; and 4) Laura Mandell, Department of English, Texas A&M. Finally, 
Jeremy Echols is at the moment our web developer and Cinzia Capon is 
helping with transcriptions and encoding. The encoding process and critical 
collaborative work by Lollini and his team will enhance enormously the 
functionality and readability of the Rvf in the context of the OPOB by making 
available crucial documents of the interpretative tradition of the text, as well as 
its cultural and historical development and reception. In our view, the work done 
for the 2012 ACLS grant advances, on the one hand, the core idea of our 
hypertext approach, and, on the other hand, the interpretative challenges of our 
research. It also provides other scholars and students with the necessary basic 
tools for discovering new interpretative paths in the documents and data we are 
making available. 

     After terminating transcription and encoding, the link Manuscripts in the 
OPOB will include the Codex Queriniano D II 21. This manuscript is one of the 
least studied of the early Petrarchan “documents” of the Rvf and one of the 
most revealing. It is a fair copy in an accurate hand that follows the 
graphological matrices inherent in Petrarch’s own manuscripts (Vatican Latino 3195 
and 3196): sonnets are copied two verses per line across the page in a two-
column format, as are canzoni, ballate, and madrigals. 

 



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The following image shows how this manuscript is transcribed using T-PEN 
software: 

 
 

     The link Incunabula in the OPOB will include the above mentioned editio 
princeps of the Canzoniere. While most copies of this first printed edition are 
known for their uniquely sparse visual presentation, without commentary or other 
paratextual features, the Queriniana copy of the editio princeps is famous for its 
extensive illustrations that serve as elaborate glosses of fundamental natural 
motifs in the poems.  

 



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The transcription of the incunabulum is particularly complex as it includes 
marginal glosses and illustrative vignettes for each poem. The following images 
show the transcribing procedure of the text: 

 

 
 

And for the handwritten glosses: 

 

The extensive code written to transcribe the few lines of the gloss gives an 
idea of the complexity of the operation. Finally, the following screenshot gives an 
idea of the procedure we are following to encode and describe the miniatures 
associated to the glosses: 

 



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The Future: Preservation, Encoding, and Interpretation 

     Digital technology is instrumental for taking critical advantage of previous 
technologies through a process of remediation of the texts we inherited from the 
past. We are aware of the humanist root of modern philology that came to life 
along with the technology of the book. One could even argue that the textual 
fluidity theorized for example by John Bryant, which is often discussed in current 
debates on digital humanities, was already perceived by early humanists. 
However, Bryant follows Derrida’s disregard of “nostalgia for origins” and of the 
idea of a truth free from “free-play.” Bryant and Derrida suggest that the free-
play of the fluid text leads to a transcendence beyond “man and humanism” and 
point out the need for new ways of reading, interpreting, and teaching, favoring 
a mode of interpretation that de-centers meaning and is happy with given and 
existing fragments of signification (10). 

     The OPOB takes into consideration the basic fluidity of texts as it has 
been identified by modern criticism as the first step of digital philology. 
Moreover, our project addresses some fundamental pitfalls of humanist philology: 
the tendency to limit the philological operation to a purely restorative and 
conservative task, or to a dialogue among authors. Nonetheless, we do not 
emphasize the free-play of fragments of signification but hypertextual construction 
of meaning, the hermeneutical value of texts through editing, marking up, 
collating, drawing on phenomenological, comparative, hermeneutic procedures, and 
moving beyond a deterministic idea of text as a pure fact. We believe in a 
philologically oriented and creative idea of criticism, intrinsically hermeneutic and 
based on a relational rather than ontological notion of meaning. This is a 
humanist idea, hermeneutical, perspectival, and finite. As we move toward the 
encoding of manuscripts and early books written six centuries ago, we are 
conscious that a restorative approach is certainly a key factor in the 
responsibility that the digital humanities have in the preservation of the memory 



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of the past. Jerome McGann has insisted on this point, arguing “for the 
philologian, materials are preserved because their simple existence testifies that 
they once had value.” We share this view, as our present work of transcribing 
and encoding Codex Queriniano D II 21 and Incunabulum Queriniano G V 15 
testifies.  

     Our aim is first of all to preserve a written and digital memory of these 
important documents of the Petrarchan tradition as they are, by transcribing and 
making note of all possible details, even those that we do not understand. 
Nonetheless, a purely conservative approach is not sufficient to address all the 
problems involved in the preservation of the memory of our humanist culture. 
That approach would miss the great opportunity that digital humanists have to 
re-think the very notion of humanism made possible by the advent of digital 
technology. From this comes the need to associate the preserving and restorative 
activity to an interpretative one. This argument is developed and addressed in 
the editorial to the present issue of Humanist Studies & the Digital Age. 

     On the one hand, we know that the “computational notion of the text as 
a type of data does not coincide with the notion of the text as a product of 
literary activity” and that the pure “markup thus belongs not to the world of 
formalisms but to the world of representations”. In other words we know that 
“markup is not a data model” but a “type of data representation,” (Buzzetti 67) 
partial and limited as any type of representation and interpretation. However, 
besides constraining us within their intrinsic limits, digital philology and textual 
encoding initiatives provide us with the challenging and stimulating opportunity to 
re-read and re-interpret the masterpieces of the past from the point of view of 
a new technology and the new questions we are facing. 

     The OPOB is willing to take on this challenge by elaborating a project 
entitled “Texts, Images, and Interpretation in the OPOB.” Building on the 
achievements of the ACLS grant, the new project will allow us to enhance the 
innovative and humanistic value of the OPOB. Developing and substantiating the 
philosophical idea of a “more than human humanism,” this new interpretative 
textual annotation will focus in particular on all the geographical and natural 
references of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Moreover, it will be complemented by the 
semantic elaboration of the already encoded images of the incunabulum 
Queriniano. Using Open Access and Semantic Web tools, we will include in our 
repository-hypertext a digital collection of images from the incunabulum. The 
images will be linked to the textual thematic network encoded to add an 
important iconographic element to the interactive net of relationships. 

     We are inspired, in part, by recent developments in the new discipline 
called ethnophilology that is working to reinstate at the center of the philological 



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task the need to study the manuscripts not exclusively from an authorial 
perspective but as a witness to the forms of civilizations that produced them. 
From this viewpoint, the author and the text need to be studied in a broader 
context that includes not only the historical, cultural environment but also the 
natural one. This is particularly true for a poet like Petrarch who had an intense 
rapport with nature throughout his entire life. Our project will show how the 
sources of his poetry are not only the manuscripts and books from the cultural 
past but also his profound dialogue with nature that accompanied his love 
relationship with Laura and triggered his metaphysical speculations. This project 
“Texts, Images, and Interpretation in the OPOB” will inaugurate the most 
innovative phase of the OPOB and provide the opportunity to validate its original 
approach to hypertext Web publishing. In particular, interpretative encoding and 
annotation, in conjunction with enhancement of the semantic encoding that links 
text and images will implement the core idea of the hypertext that we are 
building in and around the Rvf. This effort will create a collection of textualities 
broadly conceived to include intersemiotic transpositions that show the evolution of 
Petrarch’s work from manuscript to print and digital culture. The result will be a 
growing and living archive in which discrete units, entities, and systems are 
codependent and make sense only in relation to one another. These fragments 
are witnesses not only to a dialogue among authors and texts but also to a 
way of inhabiting the world and becoming human in relation to a more than the 
human environment. 

Works Cited 

Benozzo, Francesco. Etnofilologia: Un'introduzione. Napoli: Liguori, 2010. Print. 

Bryant, John. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and 

Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2002. Print. 

Buzzetti, Dino. “Digital Representation and the Text Model.” New Literary History. 

33 (2002): 61–88. Print.  

Finneran, Richard J. The Literary Text in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University 

of Michigan Press. 1996. Print. 



Humanist Studies & the Digital Age  Lollini 

3.1 Spring 2013  31 

Greene, Roland. Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric 

Sequence. Princeton, Princeton University Press. 1991. Print. 

McGann, Jerome. “Memory Now.” 4Humanities. Web. 2/02/2013. 

<http://4humanities.org/2012/08/jerome-j-mcgann-memory-now-2/> 

Lollini, Massimo. “Return to Philology and Hypertext in and around Petrarch’s 

Rvf.” Humanist Studies & the Digital Age. 1.1 (2011).  Web. 15 Sep. 2011. 

<http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/article/view/1101>.  

Petrarca, Francesco. Canzoniere; Trionfi. Cur. Cristoforo [Berardi?]. Venezia: 

Vindelino da Spira, 1470. Incunabulum Queriniano G V 15. Queriniana Library, 

Brescia. Print. 

------. Canzoniere. Codex Queriniano D II 21, Queriniana Library, Brescia. Print. 

Petrarca, Francesco, Gianfranco Contini, and Daniele Ponchiroli. Canzoniere. 

Torino: G. Einaudi, 1964. Print. 

Petrarca, Francesco, and Giuseppe Savoca. Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. Firenze: 

L.S. Olschki, 2008. Print. 

http://4humanities.org/2012/08/jerome-j-mcgann-memory-now-2/

