Abstract: Pertile seeks to demonstrate that Dante is the author of the Cangrande epistle through philological considerations. He argues that, since among the early commentators of the Comedy there was much confusion about the names of the divisions of the poem, a forger would have had difficulty in using the correct words. Moreover, he asks, how could a forger have chosen the exact terms without hesitation, as instead Boccaccio does? Pertile notes that the term "cantica" is used more frequently in the rubrics of the Paradise because by that time Dante had finally chosen that word, perhaps when he wrote the letter to his friend Cangrande.
Abstract from the American Dante Bibliography 1991
Reproduced by courtesy of the Dante Society of America