A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and conceptual architecture. The originality and distinction of this work lies in its clear systematization of a discipline whose autonomous status has only recently been recognised (at least in Italy), though its roots may extend back as far as Giorgio Pasquali. This pioneering volume offers both a methodical set of instructions on how to read critical editions, and a wide range of practical examples, expanding upon the conceptual and methodological apparatus laid out in the first two chapters. By presenting a thorough account of the historical and theoretical framework through which authorial philology developed, Paola Italia and Giulia Raboni successfully reconceptualize the authorial text as an ever-changing organism, subject to alteration and modification. What is Authorial Philology? will be of great didactic value to students and researchers alike, providing readers with a fuller understanding of the rationale behind different editing practices, and addressing both traditional and newer methods such as the use of the digital medium and its implications. Spanning the whole Italian tradition from Petrarch to Carlo Emilio Gadda, this ground-breaking volume provokes us to consider important questions concerning a text’s dynamism, the extent to which an author is ‘agentive’, and, most crucially, about the very nature of what we read.

Luigi Tansillo is one of the most interesting and representative of the Petrarchist poets active in Naples during the mid-sixteenth century. This study reconsiders his substantial lyric corpus from a variety of perspectives, opening with a survey of the textual tradition and previous critical work on his verse. Four of Tansillo's lyric collections are examined in depth, and read from narrative and thematic points of view. Particular emphasis is placed on the evolution of the collections, by exploring the ways in which very different types of narrative implying different underlying poetics can be constructed using often identical poems. Parallel to this is a consideration of Tansillo's place within the broader literary historical context, and his use of verse as a political and ideological tool in the service of the Spanish viceroy of Naples. These detailed studies of individual poetic sequences are complemented by an analysis of Tansillo's poetic language within the context of Neapolitan reactions to the questione della lingua, and of his contribution to creating a fixed iconology for the representation of jealousy in the Renaissance and Baroque lyric.