Vernacular Grammar for Dummies – Censored
DOLCE, Lodovico. Le osservationi del Dolce. Da lui stesso in questa seconda editione emendate et ampliate. Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, et fratelli. 1552.
12mo. Recased in its original binding of contemporary vellum, spine lettered in ink, later leather ties; pp. 230, [2 (register, printer’s device)], with the letter from Dolce to Ruscelli (K8–K10) excised as usual (see below); title within woodcut cartouche, woodcut Giolito device to title and final leaf, woodcut initials; slight soiling to covers, small chip to spine affecting one letter (retouched in manuscript at a later date), half of lower tie to rear board perished; small loss to corner of B11 not affecting text, small light dampstain to inner margin of first quire and to inner margin and lower corner of last two quires.
Second edition, expanded by the author, of Lodovico Dolce’s response to the questione della lingua, aiming to popularise the rules of grammar in a way that would make them accessible to those who did not speak Latin; this edition marks a turning point in the bitter literary rivalry between Dolce and Girolamo Ruscelli.
First published in 1550 (also by Giolito) as Osservationi nella volgar lingua, Dolce follows Bembo ‘in matters of grammatical and orthographic rules […] and in matters of punctuation, accentuation, poetics, metre, and rhythm’ (DBI, trans.). Although he acknowledges in his prefatory letter to Giolito that to ‘create new rules’ would verge on madness, he acknowledges that Bembo’s desire to ‘dress [grammar] in the rich cloth of eloquence’ meant that he ‘considered only the learned’ (trans.). Dolce, a prominent art theorist, friend of Titian, and the first to refer to Dante’s epic as the Divina Commedia, first addresses the question of whether the vernacular should be called Italian or Tuscan (expressing a strong preference for the latter) before discussing the definition and principles of vernacular grammar.
This edition reflects the culmination of mounting tensions between Dolce and Ruscelli. In 1552, Dolce and Ruscelli – then working as a literary editor for Valgrisi – had almost simultaneously produced new editions of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Dolce’s, published by Giolito slightly earlier, contains an address to the reader sharply critiquing editors, proofreaders, and printers of other editions of the Decameron, including Ruscelli’s edition (of which he had seen galley proofs), although he does not mention Ruscelli by name. In turn, Ruscelli attempted to correct the numerous errors in the first edition of Dolce’s Osservationi ‘covertly, without mentioning [Dolce], in his notes on language appended to the Valgrisi Decameron. Dolce refused to credit Ruscelli and instead ‘broke off the friendship, sparking a literary war in which both parties fought by means of the pen, both offensively and defensively’ (Bongi, trans.). Dolce had originally appended to this edition of his grammatical work a defamatory letter against Ruscelli for this reason, but it was so scathing that Giolito was forced – by order of the Council of Ten – to censor the letter by excising the three offending leaves from the book.
Although the book was published between May and June 1552, the order from the Council of Ten would not be issued until February 1553, so only the copies sold in the intervening nine months retained the letter; such copies are considered ‘true bibliographic rarities’ (ibid.). Ruscelli, incensed, re-sponded in kind in his Tre discorsi a Messer Lodovico (1553), arguing that Dolce’s Osservationi consisted of little more than a translation of Donatus and an amalgamation of the work of Bembo, Fortunio, Liburnio, and Alunno comprising ‘not more than two hundred lines of original work’ (quoted in Bongi, trans.).
Outside continental Europe, we find eleven copies in the US (Claremont, Duke, Harvard, Indiana, Newberry, NYPL, Ohio State, Pennsylvania, San Francisco State, UCLA, Wisconsin-Madison), and only one in the UK (Manchester).
EDIT16 CNCE 17344; USTC 827075; Bongi, pp. 353–56; Index Aureliensis XII, p. 270; Shaaber, p. 175. This edition not in Adams (see D-746–48), BM STC Italian (see p. 221), Brunet (see vol. II, col. 789), nor Graesse.
SKU: 2125231