The Rime of Miho Monaldi, or on the Fate of a Book

Among the Dalmatian and Ragusan poets of the 16th century writing in Italian the least attention has been devoted to date to the poetic oeuvre of the Dubrovnik poet Miho Monaldi. The reason for this should be sought in the rather harsh judgement of Mihovil Kombol that tended to mould the views of later studies of Monaldi’s poetic collection titled Rime. Kombol underplayed the specific features of Renaissance literary culture in Dubrovnik, above all its multilingualism and the intellectual ties with Italy, as well as the poetic conventions of 16th-century lyric poetry. Unlike his philosophical works, Monaldi’s Rime were never syste-matically studied or compared with the Italian poetry contemporary to him. The lack of scholarly attention is also reflected in the bibliographical confusion about the number of editions of his work. This essay is conceived as a first step in the systematic consideration of Rime, and of the remainder of his oeuvre, first published posthumously in 1599 in Veni...