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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3.1 Spring 2013 18
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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3.1 Spring 2013 21
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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3.1 Spring 2013 22
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
Humanist Studies & the Digital Age Lollini
3.1 Spring 2013 23
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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3.1 Spring 2013 25
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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3.1 Spring 2013 29
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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3.1 Spring 2013 30
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.
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.
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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/