Beyond the Canon. The Authoritative Role of Poetry Anthologies Challenged by the Italian Tradition of the ‘Rime piacevoli'

While studying the role of sixteenth-century poetry anthologies in the emergence of European national literatures, the Italian case stands out with particular relevance for different reasons. First, they created a common poetic language spreading all over the nation the model of Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. Secondly, especially in Venice, lyrical anthologies were amongst the most popular editorial products, and often publishers cobbled together lyrical texts written by different poets, creating bestsellers that influenced significantly the early modern poetical canon. Yet, the sixteenth-century vernacular anthologies did not only play an authoritative role in the development of the Italian poetical canon. They were sometimes also an instrument to dissent from that canon, promoting linguistic and thematic choices that were not mainstream. This article deals with the tradition of the Rime piacevoli, a series of lyrical anthologies published in the second part of the sixteenth century, that challenged, often ironically, the contemporary canonical poetry anthologies. The aim of the article is to explore a neglected use of the vernacular poetry anthology both from a literary and a commercial perspective, surveying the way they interact with the “canonical” anthologies, and studying their wide circulation and editorial success.