The Textual Transmission of the 'Devisement dou monde': Old Problems and New Insights

The edition by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto (1928) remains a fundamental reference point for the textual transmission of Marco Polo’s Devisement dou monde. In the philological study that precedes the critical text, Benedetto offers detailed analyses of all branches of the tradition and provides much data regarding the transmission and reception of the work. In Benedetto’s classification, the Latin translations Z and L, the Venetian versions V and VB, and the Italian translation by G.B. Ramusio form the B branch of the stemma codicum, which preserves several readings preferable to those in the other branch of the tradition (called A), formed, inter alia, by the Franco-Italian version F and the Old French (Fr), Tuscan (TA) and Northern-Italian (VA) translations. Most of Benedetto’s conclusions have been confirmed by the later studies by Terracini (1933) and Burgio & Eusebi (2008). Our analyses of the relationship between the Franco-Italian version and the production of French texts in medieval Tuscany and Liguria suggest a new image of the A branch of Marco Polo’s travel account. An important factor in the problem of the composition and the first circulation of the Devisement dou monde is represented by the context in which the work was created. Several studies on the circulation of Old French literature in Italy have identified a group of over thirty French manuscripts copied by Pisan prisoners while incarcerated in Genoa after the Battle of Meloria (1284). Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa conceived and composed their book in a milieu hosting an efficient scriptorium, which was actively producing chivalric, religious and didactic French texts directed at a local bourgeois audience with good French skills and specific literary tastes. Thanks to Fabrizio Cigni and Fabio Zinelli’s studies, it is possible to confirm a similarity between the Franco-Italian witnesses of the Devisement dou monde – the manuscript Bnf fr. 1116 (F) and the fragment recently discovered by Chiara Concina and studied by Philippe Ménard (f) – and the manuscripts produced in the Pisan-Genoese workshop from the point of view of spelling and language. The intensive activity of copying and reworking texts in the Genoa prison might explain some characteristics of the textual transmission of Marco Polo’s book.