De vulgari eloquentia II vi, 7: un canone della prosa?

In this contribution, I analyse a catalogue of prose authors featuring in Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, which includes Livy, Orosius, Frontinus, and Pliny. Mirko Tavoni has recently suggested that Dante could have visited Verona's Chapter Library and that the list of authors could have been inspired by the works he accessed there. While accepting the possibility that Dante accessed Livy's work in Verona, I argue that his catalogue of prose authors in the De vulgari eloquentia is likely to have been composed according to a genre-related principle, like the analogous canon of poets which immediately precedes it in the same passage. More specifically, I demonstrate that the four authors were all considered historians during the Middle Ages: Livy was celebrated as the most important Latin historian; Orosius wrote a universal history; Frontinus was only known from his Stratagemata, a collection of exemplary historical facts concerning war strategies; and Pliny, as I establish for the first time, was considered a historian due to a misinterpretation of a passage by Svetonius. I complete my analysis by pointing out several cases in which various medieval authors pair up poetry with prose or historiography interchangeably, thus explaining why Dante can affirm that he is making a list of prose authors and then produce a more circumscribed list of historians.