The Materiality of the Text and Manuscript Culture Page 1 of 15 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 14 April 2021 Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - Early and Medieval, World Literature, Literary Studies - Poetry and Poets Online Publication Date: Apr 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198820741.013.2 The Materiality of the Text and Manuscript Culture Martin Eisner The Oxford Handbook of Dante Edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden Abstract and Keywords This article investigates the significance of the manuscripts of Virgil and other classical poets that Dante might have read. Calling attention to the presence of musical notation (neumes) in copies that share the particular Virgilian readings Dante quotes, this essay explores the resonance of one of those passages (Aeneas’ dream of Hector) in Dante’s po em. It shows how Dante uses this Virgilian episode to craft his encounter with Manfred where he considers the relationship of body and soul that constitutes one of the major dif ferences between classical and Christian thought, as Augustine frequently noted. Just as Christian anthropology maintains that the body constitutes an essential element of the human person, this essay argues that the materiality of the texts Dante read constitutes a crucial source for understanding how Dante interpreted these texts. Keywords: Virgil, manuscripts, materiality of the text, reading, neumes, body/soul, neumes musical notation WHILE many of Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s manuscripts have survived, allowing scholars to reconstruct the development of their texts and analyze the traces of their readings, no similar material exists for Dante. 1 Although Leonardo Bruni claims to have seen Dante’s ‘thin, tall, and very correct’ script in the early fifteenth century, the lack of any authentic material means we would not know a Dante autograph even if we held it in our hands. 2 This absence is especially disappointing given that, as E. R. Curtius notes, ‘the entire book imagery of the Middle Ages is brought together, intensified, broadened, and re newed by the boldest imagination in Dante’s work—from the first paragraph of the Vita nuova to the last canto of the Divina Commedia’. 3 Although Curtius argues that medieval reading constituted ‘an assimilation and retracing of given facts’, Dante’s first paragraph of the Vita nuova shows that Dante has a more complex understanding of how to read a book. Dante writes: In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica