Browsing Through the Search Engines and Digital Archives of Accademia della Crusca: Chapters of the History of Indirect Tradition

In recent years, the Accademia della Crusca has made its archives accessible to the scientific community through a digitalization project and the creation of searchable databases. This study examines over thirty allegazioni (quotations) of the Actus Apostolorum, translated into the vernacular around 1330 by the preacher Domenico Cavalca and included in the first edition of the Vocabolario (1612). While only one quotation explicitly references the known tradition of Cavalca’s work, the rest come from a lost manuscript, believed to be the earliest version of his translation. Additional excerpts, absent from the Vocabolario, appear in the Quaderno Riccardiano and Pier Francesco Cambi’s anthology. The second part of the article explores quotations from a lost commentary on the Evangelii by the Crusca’s first secretary, Bastiano de’ Rossi (Inferigno). These citations of the known tradition of Cavalca’s work may themselves be indirect references, suggesting a layered textual tradition. Though de’ Rossi’s manuscript is difficult to locate, a 1490 edition of his Evangelii commentary, digitized in Google Books, contains Actus Apostolorum excerpts identical to those in Cavalca’s text.