“Towards an Electronic Esposizioni: Code as
Commentary”
Cristiana
Fordyce
Brown University
cristiana_fordyce@brown.edu
Vika
Zafrin
Brown University
zafrin@brown.edu
In 1374, the city of Florence awarded Giovanni Boccaccio the honor and
responsibility of presenting to a civic audience Dante's Divine
Comedy, and of commenting on it. The author of the Decameron held a series of lectures on the Comedy at the Church of Santo Stefano. He doubled as commentator
and preacher: the lectures were intended as both literary and moral education.
Boccaccio was engaged to elucidate all one hundred cantos of the Divine Comedy; unfortunately, he died long before he could
complete this task, and the readings are abandoned at Canto 17 of the Inferno.
The text of Boccaccio's lectures has survived to our days as the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia. Despite only covering the first
seventeen cantos, in print, it is over 700 pages long.° The text is comprised
of an Accessus (introduction) followed by literal and allegorical exposition on
each of the first cantos of the Inferno. (The tenth
canto contains no allegorical exposition, as Boccaccio claims that it contains
no allegorical import.) The Esposizioni therefore
functions both as lecture series and as encyclopedia. From the beginning,
Boccaccio keeps a prudent distance from theological and intellectual
exposition.
Most interested in revealing the effectiveness and clarity of the Dantean text,
Boccaccio strives to cater to the needs of his listeners. He accomplishes this
through maintaining the traditional rhetorical form of the expositio, while
focusing on the utility of the Comedy for the audience
he is to instruct. Boccaccio employs simple and effective means of delivery, in
an attempt to evoke in his audience images and exempla from collective memory
and individual experience. Despite his awareness of the great responsibility
with which he was charged, Boccaccio seems to have felt indebted neither to the
rhetorical tradition nor to moral instruction in his effort to produce the
utilitas of comprehension of the magnitude of Dante's work.
Today, we have chosen to offer Dante's text online as commented and presented by
one of the most prominent medieval literary critics. We aim at employing the
spirit that inspired Boccaccio in his lectures. To this end, we wish to recreate
for the modern reader the same utility and efficiency for which Boccaccio's
lessons strove with regard to his own audience. The exigencies of our
contemporaries when reading a medieval text are not the same as those of the
people who gathered in Santo Stefano more than six hundred years ago. The
present audience needs to be introduced not only to Dante but to the language
and rhetorical structures that Boccaccio employed to benefit the public of his
time. To understand the Esposizioni, it is first
necessary to understand the audience to whom the lectures were addressed in the
first place.
This project is in the beginning stages of development. Our ultimate aim is to
map the relationships between our various primary and secondary source texts –
the text of the Esposizioni itself, that of the Divine Comedy, and the writing of the many other authors
whom Boccaccio quotes. We will be using XML to encode essential information
about the people and places mentioned in the Esposizioni, paying particular attention to information that the
medieval lecture attendee would have taken for granted, which may not be quite
as obvious to the modern reader. In the course of his exposition, Boccaccio
frequently alludes to texts by classical and medieval authors (such as Virgil
and Livy); we plan to make available the relevant passages from those texts
alongside the principal text. For example, it will be useful to provide context
and detail about the external texts Boccaccio quotes, as well as historical and
biographical information regarding the authors upon whose work he bases his
arguments. Where other types of annotation are necessary which will bring our
audience closer to Boccaccio's writing, thereby making it more useful in
understanding the Comedy, they will also be inserted.
In this paper, we would like to address some issues which have arisen in the
process of our thinking about how to approach such a project electronically. The
Esposizioni is a fascinating, multilayered medieval
text. We treat it as both a commentary and expositio on Dante, and as a
stand-alone, authoritative text. We view our electronic publication in the same
dichotomous fashion; in addition to presenting the text of the commentary, we
provide our own commentary in the form of the code itself. It is essentially a
divulgative commentary: our purpose is to bring to our readers enough
supplementary information to Boccaccio's text for it to be as useful to them as
it was to his medieval audience. Of course, we cannot hope to replicate the
experience of the original audience of this text, but with an awareness of the
inter-relations between author, speaker, audience, and reader, we hope to create
a multivalent resource which will challenge and inform in a similar way to that
envisaged by Boccaccio in his lectures.
As our starting point, we embrace Michel Meyer's view of rhetoric as a method of
negotiation between two poles – the listener (reader) on one hand, and the
writer on the other. We follow Meyer's lead to consider our role in encoding and
presenting the Esposizioni as a formal negotiation
between intended audiences. The markup of the text, as Lou Burnard has pointed
out, rests on the importance of "a single encoding scheme, a unified semiotic
system... a single formalism [by using which] we reduce the complexity inherent
in representing the interconnectedness of all aspects of our hermeneutic
analysis, and thus facilitate a polyvalent analysis" (Burnard 1998). Although
Burnard was speaking about mark-up in general, his point is especially valid for
a complex electronic medieval text such as the Esposizioni.
What we do by commenting through markup is not new, so why do all this with the
aid of a computer? The answer to this is inextricably tied to the principal
difference between the potential audience for our project, and Boccaccio's.
There are no specific records for those who attended Boccaccio’s expository
lectures, but we can assume that a large part of the audience was literate at
least in the Florentine vernacular, and possibly in Latin as well. The
prestigious lectures would have attracted academic and clerical professionals,
scholars and students, as well as interested members of the lay community. There
are many differences between Boccaccio’s audience and the modern-day reader of
the Esposizioni. First and foremost, we are no longer a
memory-based culture, and the modern reader tends not to possess the mnemonic
resources which would have enabled Boccaccio’s original audience to recognize
his explicit and implied intertextual allusions. The amount of information
available to us nowadays is so vast that we are a research-based learning
culture, much more heavily dependent on libraries and other information
depositories. In addition, the modern reader may have had relatively little
exposure to the key texts for the medieval scholar, such as the major classical
and medieval authors, and even the Bible. Finally, even if the modern reader has
the linguistic ability to engage with an Italian-language text, they may not
have the facility to read and understand the many Latin citations in this
work.
All of the above problems can be resolved through a sympathetic and accurate
annotation of the electronic text. Electronic data storage space is our only
choice for the easiest and most coherent presentation of the amount of
information we must convey in order to bring our audience closer to Boccaccio's.
Furthermore, by putting the Esposizioni online, we
offer the option of simplifying the commentary for the electronic user, by
offering various different ways into the text. Boccaccio's text often seems
chaotic in nature to the modern reader: it is endlessly self-referential,
sometimes self-contradictory, and at other times simply incorrect. (We should
not of course forget that the text we have is a series of notes intended for
oral delivery and possible further explication.) By a semantic encoding of each
of the themes and subjects treated within this dauntingly linear exposition, the
user is no longer constrained to follow Boccaccio’s digressive reasoning. This
opportunity to encode a series of short comments on varied subjects and make
them semantically searchable is a great advantage of the medium and will be of
great value to future users..
Electronic publication and dissemination of this medieval text does not restore
it to its original meaning, but it does restore it to its original purpose: to
take a text out of the hands of the elite and bring it closer to all members of
the interested public. The electronic medium is thus, paradoxically, a simpler,
more straightforward one than print, for our purposes. Paper-based publication
of such a tightly interwoven, heavily annotated text could in theory convey all
this information, but would do so in a much more awkward fashion. Instead, we
will publish it electronically, making it easier both for us to comment, and for
our readers to apprehend. The computer is our "wooden key,"; we "wish nothing
but to open what is closed," and will use the simplest tool for the task.°We will thus de-mystify the Esposizioni
for our contemporaries, as Boccaccio in his time de-mystified the Divine Comedy.
REFERENCES
Peter Abelard. “Prologue to Sic et non.” Sic et Non: a critical edition. Ed. Blanche B. Boyer Richard McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Lou Burnard. “On the hermeneutic implications of text
encoding.” New Media and the Humanities: Research and Applications. Proceedings of the first seminar “Computers, literature and philology.” Edinburgh, 7-9 September 1998. Ed. Domenico Fiormonte Jonathan Usher. Oxford: Humanities Computing Unit, University of Oxford, 2001.
Mary J. Carruthers. The book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Michael Meyer. Rhetoric, language, and reason. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.