Dante e la codificazione grammaticale nel XVI secolo

The article aims to analyze the image of Dante within the grammatical codification in the Italian Renaissance. As it is well known, the grammarians took as their model the thirteenth-century language of the Three Crowns to develop the rules to be applied later to the written language. If the language of Petrarch and Boccaccio fixed the model to follow for poetry and prose, in this century the language of Dante experienced a sort of “Bembian censorship”. This censorship was due to the interpretation, within the Prose della volgar lingua by Pietro Bembo, of the crude and dishonored words of the Comedy (see Prose II. 5). The article traces the positions of the main grammarians with respect to Dante’s linguistic structures: through a systematic investigation of the quotations of Dante’s works within the main grammar books of the sixteenth century (by Fortunio, Bembo, Del Rosso, Gabriele, Giambullari, and Varchi), the way in which Bembo’s position was interpreted and accepted or not in the Renaissance will be outlined. The article will show that after the death of Bembo the grammars will begin to receive more quotations from Dante’s works.