Edited by Ruskin: Francesca Alexander's Roadside Songs of Tuscany

In 1907 Cook and Wedderburn, published the volume XXXII of the Library Edition under the general title of Studies of Peasant Life: The Story of Ida, Roadside Songs of Tuscany, Christ’s Folk in the Appennine, Ulric the Farm Servant. The volume bears on the frontispiece “Edited and arranged by John Ruskin”. The largest part of the volume is devoted to works by Francesca Alexander and proves to be a tribute to this American artist. In this paper I outline the story of the edition of Francesca Alexander’s Roadside Songs of Tuscany, from its manuscript form of “Francesca’s Book” to the published serial edition issued in the years 1884-1885. I argue that Ruskin’s interest in the project has a special relation to the publication of the Fioretti di San Francesco in mid-nineteenth-century French and English versions, and to the ideological context that generated it. Ruskin’s declared aim of conveying to the English mind “some sympathetic conception of the reality of the sweet soul of Catholic Italy” was generated within this context, and his idea of publishing Francesca’s manuscript in a heavily edited and thoroughly new form underlines this comparison with continental research into Medieval literature in the last decades of the 19th century.