<i>“Patron or printer: that is the question”</i>. Autorialità e problemi metodologici nell’edizione dei <i>Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers</i>

Abstract

The essay addresses the methodological issues underlying the preliminary work for the edition of the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. The textual tradition is characterized by a marked complexity: the editio princeps, published by Caxton in 1477 (C1) and containing Rivers’s text revised by the printer, is followed by Lambeth Palace Library MS 265 (L), which presents a revision of C1 made by Rivers, while the second edition, produced around 1480 (C2), integrates only some variants from L and introduces further corrections by Caxton. This stemmatic complexity poses fundamental methodological dilemmas involving reconstructive criteria, authorial philology, and the philology of printed texts, and are closely tied to the question of the authorship of the Dicts in the various forms in which it is preserved.