Andrea Alessandri

Doktorand in der mittelalterlichen Geschichte 

Dissertationsprojekt

For a critical edition of book V of the Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu Christi by Ubertino da Casale

The project seeks to provide a critical edition of book V of the AVC, an important goal both for the relevance book V has obtained since the fifteenth century - as well as its circulation - and the perspective of detailed studies regarding the whole text and the author's life. The edition of the text available today is that of the incunabulum by Andrea de Bonettis, Venetiis 1485, normally used in modern studies and now made more easily accessible in the anastatic reproduction edited by C.T. Davis (Ubertino da Casale, Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu, edited by C. T. Davis, Turin 1961, rep. anast.). In particular, attention will be paid to the problem of the different editorial phases of the text, trying, as far as additions and revisions of the last book are concerned, to verify the possibility of different writing and rewriting phases in relation to the alternating periods of "political" and non political commitment. Also, the relationship between the circulation and the use of a manuscript witness and its area of production and utilization will be considered, without neglecting the weight of the re-use of Ubertino's text in the works of the Brabantini or German pre-Reformation spirituals.

The starting point of the project will be the work of Martinez Ruiz and Daniele Solvi, particularly the new catalogue of manuscript witnesses, edited by Silvia Nocentini. This simple census will be the basis for a catalogue of the manuscripts, aimed at editing the critical edition, as well as paying attention to the historical relevance of the codicological description. The text and the critical apparatus will be produced according to the results of the recensio, providing the necessary information about the editorial development in the most editorially appropriate form. An introduction will aim at reconstructing the historical and intellectual relevance of the AVC, enhancing the communication system that the study of codices and the tradition reveals, and then integrating these pieces of information into the source system on which we have more knowledge. The goal is to reconstruct, above all, the ways in which the historical facts involved in the conflicts within the ecclesiastical system at the beginning of the fourteenth century were perceived and communicated, considering them as a system of images, generating conflicting identities.