‘Certi quaderni di diverse chose’. Il ‘movimento della tradizione’ e le biblioteche medievali. Appunti sui libri in volgare (XIII-XIV secolo)

This paper focuses on the catalogues of medieval libraries as materia} sources, in order to investigate the manuscript tradition of Romance literatures. The author 's approach consists of a methodological discussion on the contribution of medieval catalogues from two different points of view. On the one hand, the ancient catalogues provide us with much information about the 'materiai form' of Romance manuscripts: sometimes they describe the books and qualify their nature. On the other hand, the same catalogues testify to lost stages - or stages unknown by 'positive sources' -of a textual tradition. In both cases, medieval catalogues of­fer the possibility of pursuing textual criticism and the history of manuscript trad­itions together, that is, to conciliate different facets of the philological enterprise.