L’edizione digitale dell’«Esordio» della «Storia d’Italia» di Francesco Guicciardini

Abstract

Francesco Guicciardini’s Storia d'Italia, which the author revised and rewrote numerous times, remains a largely unexplored field of philological study. Indeed, there are still many unanswered questions about the method applied by Guicciardini for writing what is widely regarded as a masterpiece of historiography and an admirable example of Italian prose. The study of a topical segment of the work, the Exordium, rightly celebrated by generations of readers and scholars, presents numerous challenges that find an investigative tool in digital technologies that was, until recently, unavailable. The project, carried out by the University of Liège, in collaboration with other Italian and French institutions (Université Grenoble-Alpes, ENS Lyon, Université Paris 8, University of Naples Federico II), aims to investigate the problems of representation and editorial rendering of a stratified and complex text. This study proposal, however, is not exclusive. Other forms of edition, more traditional and on paper, as recently experimented in the volume Come lavorava Guicciardini, can complete our reading of Guicciardini’s famous Exordium.