The research project aims to sound out a part of the manuscript tradition of Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, in order to propose a new attempt at testimonial classification. The definition of the corpus on which to act derives from the acquisitions of Marco Cursi («Misere vesti, lieti inchiostri, impomiciate carte»: codici, copisti e lettori della Fiammetta e del Corbaccio, in Aimer ou ne pas aimer. Boccace, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta et Corbaccio, Presses Sorbonne Novelle, Parigi, 2018, pp. 35-70), who recognizes the 16 oldest codices of the entire tradition, with 1425 as established chronological limit.

Due, therefore, to the state of art and the related internal divergences, the ambition of the project is to reanalyze, and partly analyze for the first time, the aforementioned 16 codices, so that the bipartition of the stemma (with related articulations) can be confirmed or reshaped at least for the manuscripts under study, and furthermore to begin sounding out the complex system of relations that would characterize one of the two branches of the Fiammetta, the one traditionally referred to as Beta, whose dignity has never been made the subject of exhaustive evaluations. All of this would be an indispensable requirement in view of a new critical edition of the text.

The project, in parallel, involves the creation of a relational database that will then be poured into a web platform, dedicated to the querying of manuscripts and textual variance more broadly. Metadata will be acquired by comparing traditional analyses and results obtained through the latest digital tools (mainly transcribers and collators).

Accompanying the integral collation of the 16 witnesses will therefore be an articulate descriptive sheet, the modeling of which in the digital sphere includes not only the necessary paleographic, codicological and historical-library aspects, but also purely philological peculiarities.