Petrarch and Boccaccio in the First Commentaries on Dante’s Commedia. A Literary Canon Before its Official Birth

This text proposes a reinterpretation of the history behind the canon of the Tre Corone (Three Crowns), which consists of the three great Italian authors of the fourteenth century – Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Examining the first commentaries on Dante’s Commedia, the book argues that the elaboration of the canon of the Tre Corone does not date back to the fifteenth century but instead to the last quarter of the fourteenth century. The investigation moves from Guglielmo Maramauro’s commentary – circa 1373, and the first exegetical text in which we can find explicit quotations from Petrarch and Boccaccio – to the major commentators of the second half of the fourteenth century: Benvenuto da Imola, Francesco da Buti and the Anonimo Fiorentino. The work focuses on the conceptual and poetic continuity between Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio as identified by the first interpreters of the Commedia, demonstrating that contemporary readers and intellectuals immediately recognised a strong affinity between these three authors based on criteria not merely linguistic or rhetorical. The findings and conclusions of this work are of great interest to scholars of Dante, as well as those studying medieval poetry and Italian literature