Abstract

This research addresses the diffusion of manuscripts and printed editions of Giovanni Pico's letters, most of them written in Latin. A collection of his letters was gathered and edited by his nephew Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola shortly after his uncle's death. It was first published in Bologna in 1496 by Benedetto Faelli along with the rest of Pico's work. It was then reprinted ten times, almost unchanged, by different printers during the fifteenth century. Yet some epistles remained excluded from this collection, which was published with apologetic intention by Giovan Francesco, who was interested in delivering an orthodox image of his uncle's spirituality. The collection is therefore partial and unreliable, since it was not compiled according to philological principles, and further letters have since been discovered in different manuscripts. ;In order to provide a reliable critical edition of these letters it is necessary to locate, collect, describe, and collate both the letters in the manuscripts and in the printed editions . The dissertation focuses only on the first three above-mentioned steps. The part of the work that has already been completed regards locating copies of manuscripts and printed editions containing Pico's letters, while the process of collecting the epistles is already at its final stage. ;The outline of the thesis is as follows. The first chapter deals with the problem of Giovanni Pico's epistolary production in relation to his works, trying to identify the specificity of letter writing as a genre and its functions in his intellectual context, and in his cultural and scholarly relationships with other humanists. The second chapter addresses the problems related to the critical edition of Giovanni Pico's letters, and provides a description of all the manuscripts containing groups of epistles or single letters, depending on the various cases. In a third, and last, chapter a diplomatic edition of the collection of letters in the 1496 Bolognese edition is provided, followed by an appendix on the diffusion of the same edition