Original scientific paper
The Rime of Miho Monaldi, or the Fate of a Book
Borna Treska
orcid.org/0000-0001-7991-5905
; Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Abstract
Among the Dalmatian and Ragusan poets of the 16th century writing in Italian the least attention has been devoted to date to the poetic oeuvre of the Dubrovnik poet Miho Monaldi. The reason for this should be sought in the rather harsh judgement of Mihovil Kombol that tended to mould the views of later studies of Monaldi’s poetic collection titled Rime. Kombol underplayed the specific features of Renaissance literary culture in Dubrovnik, above all its multilingualism and the intellectual ties with Italy, as well as the poetic conventions of 16th-century lyric poetry. Unlike his philosophical works, Monaldi’s Rime were never systematically studied or compared with the Italian poetry contemporary to him. The lack of scholarly attention is also reflected in the bibliographical confusion about the number of editions of his work. This essay is conceived as a first step in the systematic consideration of Rime, and of the remainder of his oeuvre, first published posthumously in 1599 in Venice.
Monaldi’s works were prepared for the press by his nephews Marin and Gabro Battitorre, who inherited his manuscripts. However, the Battitorre brothers did not come into possession of the papers immediately upon the death of their uncle. It was only after 1594, on the death of Monaldi’s aunt, Deša Turčinović, who bequeathed to the brothers her property and all that she had inherited, that they became the owners of Monaldi’s manuscripts. The brothers prepared Monaldi’s works – Irene, overo della bellezza (Irene, or on Beauty), Dialogo dell’havere (Dialogue on Property) and Compendio breve della metafisica (A Short Compendium of Metaphysics) – for the press in the spring of 1599, as witnessed by the dedicatory epistles in the printed edition. From these we learn that the relationship between Monaldi and Marin Battitorre was very close, and the publication of the work was a mark of the latter’s gratitude toward his late uncle. It is now impossible to ascertain how the uncle had intended his printed oeuvre to be arranged,
although the intention to have it printed is discernible. Documents in the State Archives in Venice reveal something about the process of the printing of Monaldi’s works. They include the printing license, the certificate issued by the Reformers of the University of Padua and the approval of three readers who had reviewed the manuscripts of the works for the purposes of censorship. These approvals are invaluable for they tell of the changes made in the text of Rime and of the dialogue Irene by the chief inquisitor. We learn of this also from the printer’s address to the readers in the 1599 edition of Irene.
While something can be learned from archival documents about the process of the printing and censorship of Monaldi’s works, the surviving copies pose much more complicated problems. Since all of Monaldi’s works were printed at the same time in Venice, one would expect them to have circulated together. Nevertheless, fewer than half of the known exemplars contain all the works, while in other volumes only two works are bound together, and some copies have just one work. The question arises as to the reason for this heterogeneity. Monaldi’s works were issued as three bibliographical units, each having its own title page, dedication, and signature series. Thematically, they can be divided into two units: philosophical works (dialogues) and poetic works (Rime). In the first unit, Irene and the two shorter dialogues are bound with a list of errata for Irene alone (at
the end of the index of the two shorter dialogues), while Rime are an independent whole that is not connected with the dialogues. Similarly significant are the two versions of the title page that appear in the printed copies of Monaldi’s works. They differ only in the engraved coat of arms. On one title page is featured the coat of arms of Christina of Lorraine, and on the other the alleged Monaldi’s coat of arms. Battitorre was a merchant who was active in Venice and had business contacts with Florentine merchants, and it seems that the choice of coat of arms was closely connected to his personal aspirations in Italy. While it has been previously noted that in early 1608 Pietro Petracci dedicated an anthology of devotional verses Le Muse sacre to Battitorre, it has not been observed that the same work contains two Petracci poems for Battitorre or that in 1607 the printer Giovanni Battista
Ciotti of Siena dedicated to Battitorre a translation into Italian of the work by the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Ribadeneira. Nor has it been observed that Battitorre was a more prolific poet than previously thought and that he wrote in Italian too, for in 1608 two of his encomiastic sonnets in Italian were included in the Dialoghi of Giovan Battista Clario, also published by Ciotti; one was for the addressee of the dedicatory epistle, and the other for the printer. Dialoghi gives us an insight into Battitorre’s publishing activity in the early 17th century, as the book also included a sonnet of Pietro Petracci addressed to Battitorre as well as the printer’s address to the readers, from which it can be gathered that the printing of the Dialoghi was in fact Battitorre’s initiative.
Another Battitorre’s publishing enterprise, which introduced considerable confusion into literary history, tells us a little more about his aspirations in Italy. The published scholarship often claims that in 1604 Battitorre produced a second edition of Monaldi’s works. This supposed second edition had on the title page of Irene the engraved coat of arms of Ferdinand II Habsburg, with whom Battitorre was closely associated, as he was very active in Ferdinand’s circle of patronage in the first decade of the 17th century. What appeared to be the second edition of Monaldi’s works, furnished with a new title page and a new dedication again witnessing to Battitorre’s changing social ambitions, was, rather, a new issue of the edition of 1599. A detailed study of the surviving copies from 1599 and the surviving copies from 1604 (over thirty altogether) proves that the copies of the so-called 1604 edition are, in fact, nothing but copies of the 1599 edition in which the first gathering was replaced with a newly printed one, containing a different title page, featuring a new coat of arms, and a different dedication, while the address to the readers remained the same and was simply reset. The purpose of the new gathering was to conceal the fact that the rest of the book actually came from the 1599 printing, of which copies were obviously still available in 1604 and were in this way refurbished in order to reach a new kind of audience. Therefore, it can be concluded that before the Occhi edition of 1783, Monaldi’s works went through only one edition, that from 1599, which in 1604 was placed on the market again with a new title page and a changed dedicatory epistle. For the printing of Monaldi’s poems in Dubrovnik, Occhi used the copy of Jakov Basiljević preserved
today in the Dubrovnik Research Library, as can be inferred from the traces of ink left by Occhi’s compositors.
The final part of the essay considers the latest contribution to the study of Monaldi’s works – the Matica hrvatska edition of Rime from 2020, edited and tranlated by Tonko Maroević. While this was a turning point in the critical reception of Monaldi, the edition was in many ways problematic. Two sonnets are missing from the reprint, and the censored places that are left empty in the previous editions of Rime are here filled with replacements that use images of original typography without alerting the reader to such interventions. It is not known which copy the editor of the reprint used, but it was almost certainly the one kept in the Library of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. This copy contains, in the censored places, handwritten variants that supplement the text. These variants are introduced as printed words in the Matica edition, as if they had been there originally. The comparison of the typography of the words in the censored places with the remainder of the text, as well as the analysis of the metrical problems, proves that in the Matica edition the facsimile was graphically modified and corrected, and that in fact the original Monaldi text has been materially emended without any justification.
Keywords
Miho Monaldi; Rime; Marin Battitorre; censorship; history of printing; scholarly editions; textual studies; Dubrovnik; Italian Renaissance poetry
Hrčak ID:
304341
URI
Publication date:
15.6.2023.
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