Il volgarizzamento toscano trecentesco della «Legenda aurea». Appunti e prolegomeni per un'edizione critica

The Golden Legend, the abridged legendary and authentic hagiographic summa written by the Dominican Jacopo da Varazze, has experienced a wide circulation in the original Latin text and in several European vernacular versions. However, there are only a few translations of the entire work, and many are still unpublished. Among the Italian translations of Varazze's legendary only one, the earliest, was published, that is the fourteenth-century Florentine translation published by Arrigo Levasti between 1924 and 1926. This edition, however, is not reliable and is based on the transcript of only one ms., the codex Riccardiano (1254). This article presents a new census of the manuscript tradition of the text, with the addition of a full textual witness (the MS. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Can. It. 267), the description of the nine key textual witnesses, and a proposal for a recensio, based on the collation of selected chapters of the legendary, which constitutes the prolegomena to the work of the critical edition, currently being prepared by a team of scholars (LAI Project - Legenda aurea in Italiano).