To celebrate the seventh centenary of Giovanni Boccaccio’s birth (1313–2013) several cultural activities took place around the world. Our seminar focuses on a set of articles collected in the journal Italia Medioevale e Umanistica and entirely devoted to the Italian ‘humanist’. The aim was to disclose a new profile of Boccaccio, who should now be recognised not just as the novelist of the Decameron, but as a scribe and a scholar as important as Petrarch devoted to the rediscovery and study of the Latin Classics. Our seminar will discuss the methodological approach underpinning that major advance: a method which is based on the collaboration between philologists and palaeographers, the former specialising in researching textual transmission, the latter in exploring the materiality of texts. There will be a small display of some relevant manuscripts and early printed books, and a discussion of the application of this source-based methodology to the transmission of texts in print, facilitated by tools developed in the digital Humanities.