I 'Diurnali' di Matteo Spinelli: introduzione a un'edizione critica

Abstract

The paper reviews the course of the controversy surrounding Matteo Spinelli’s Diurnali, a notable chronicle which speaks about the events that took place in Southern Italy between 1247-1268. Recognized by many as a forgery written in the 16th century, the chronicle has sparked a long debate about its authenticity. A turning point in this debate was marked by the discovery, by two Neapolitan bibliophiles, of the only seventeenth-century print that belonged to Marcello Bonito and that shows an interesting mixture of ancient and modern linguistic forms. Following the first surveys of the Diurnali’s lexicon attempted by Bartolommeo Capasso in the 19th century and draw on the tools that Italian lexicography and southern dialectlogy
nowadays can offer, this paper aims to report the need of a new linguistic analysis of the chronicle.