Gastronomia «dei dodici commensali» in un frammento Marciano di tardo Trecento

This essay presents a new, finally scholarly edition of the parchment leaf whose recto contains ten ancient cooking recipes, currently catalogued as Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. XIV 232 (4257), nr. 142 (= Ve). Although highly fragmentary, this manuscript is one of the witnesses to the so-called culinary tradition of the «Twelve diners», against which the ten preserved recipes are compared. A paleographic analysis has now assigned this fragment a revised date, placing the composition of the recipes in the last quarter of the 14th century. This re-dating is made possible by identifying the hand that wrote the recipes as the hand M1 present in the manuscript Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. XIV 223 (4340), a codex associated with Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio (ca. 1330-1388), who was virtually the sole – though not autograph – transmitter of his Rime and Epistole, and who certainly came from a milieu very close to Dondi himself. The article is enriched with a linguistic note that attempts to distinguish the Tuscan elements from those of the Veneto variety present in the Ve fragment.