The 1727 Reprint of the Giuntina

298 p.; 12⁰

During the second half of the sixteenth century and the whole seventeenth century, Dante’s lyric poetry was never printed. In 1727 in Florence an editor under the pseudonym of Afoto Aletino (the “unenlightened truthbearer”) reprinted the Giuntina to mark its second centenary, inaugurating a series of new editions of Dante’s lyric poetry.
The 1727 Giuntina maintains all of the poems encompassed in the 1527 anthology and Bernardo di Giunta’s preface. Aletino corrected some errors, improved punctuation and spelling, and added several tools for the reader: another preface, an “avviso al lettore” (“notice to the reader”), an index, and an appendix with variants of Dante’s poems. His major intervention, however, was the re-ordering of the poems of the Vita Nuova (books I and II): instead of following the order chosen by Dante in his own work, Aletino reorders them by genre.