L''Arcadia' in antologia : affioramenti eglogistici nelle sillogi di rime quattro-cinquecentesche

Sannazaro’s eclogues know a wide manuscript circulation even outside the pastoral prosimeter of Arcadia. This so-called inorganic tradition of eclogues extracted from the narrative frame of the work shows that, at least at the beginning, they were also read as autonomous units, such as to be perfectly suited to the structure and the compilation of poetry anthologies. This fact is less surprising if one remembers the high rate of lyrical contamination exhibited, already from the choice of the metric form, by four eclogues of Arcadia, which have the form of Petrarchan canzoni and sestinas. This paper is focused on the presence of these four eclogues in some 15th end 16th century anthologies of lyric poetry, in order to study the attitude of the copyists (who were also the first readers) towards these four bucolic pieces that went beyond the canonic genre of eclogues written in terza rima or at most of the polymeter, however ternary-based. There are also cases in which the tradition of this “lyrical” eclogues is intertwined with that of Sannazaro’s canzoni and sonnets (e.g. in the manuscrpt Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. it. 61, two of these eclogues appear alongside other Sannazaro’s poems in a 16th century anthology of lyric poetry opened by Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Trionfi).