Francesco Alunno - Le Ricchezze della Lingua Volgare -
Folio [29.5 x 20.5 cm]. 225 ff, (1) ff. With large Aldine device on title page and verso of final leaf. A pleasant, large copy, bound in neat 17th century velum with gilt-and-red title label on spine. Binding a little worn, chipped; light dampstaining to margins of scattered leaves; finger-soiling to title-page and a few very minor paper flaws to first few leaves, but mainly a very good copy, clean and fresh.First edition of this fundamental and highly influential work in the codification of the Italian literary idiom. Applying the humanist fascination with philology to the authors of the Trecento, Alunno ultimately succeeded in canonizing the usage of Dante, Petrarch, and above all Boccaccio as the most admirable examples of the Italian language. As he himself notes in the second edition of Le Ricchezze (), all of the copies of this first edition were sold within the space of a few months, and later editions met with similar success. Indeed, by we even find an edition of the Decamerone offered by Paolo Gerardo “con le Ricchezze dell'Alunno” built-in; hence Renouard's comment, “fut en grand estime, et eut un grand nombre de lecteurs”.The work is dedicated to Alessandro Farnese (), Cardinal Nephew to Paul III and an important patron of the arts of his time. Lengthy instructions to the reader precede the main body of the text, an alphabetical register of the most elegant words and expressions employed in the works of Boccaccio, and to a lesser extent Petrarch and Dante. Perhaps intended merely as a glossary of the Tuscan literary classics, Alunno's work became a proscriptive guide to usage; it was immediately used, for example, as the basis of William Thomas' Italian Dictionarie of , and for the celebrated translator John Florio's A Worlde of Wordes ().* Adams A-842 (one copy, imperfect); Renouard, Alde, p. 127, no. 2; Suttina, Bibliografia delle opere a stampa intorno a Francesco Petrarca, 535; BL Italian, 21; Fowler, p. 199;Ascarelli-Menato, pp. . Read More