(ca. 1220–1294). Brunetto Latini was active in Florentine public life as a notario, or lawyer, by 1254. In 1260, he was sent as ambassador by the Florentine commune to King Alfonso X the Wise of Castile, with the aim of enlisting this Guelf monarch in the struggle against Manfred and the Ghibellines. According to his Tesoretto (11. 123–62), Brunetto was returning from this embassy when he met a student from Bologna in the Pass of Roncevaux who told him of the Guelf defeat at Montaperti (September 4,1260). Brunetto then spent six years of exile in France until the defeat and death of Manfred at Benevento (February 28, 1266). On returning to Florence, he held a series of important public offices and was frequently consulted by the Florentine government. While in France, Brunetto had written his Rettorica, a translation of and commentary on the first seventeen chapters of Cicero’s De inventione. He later continued this effort at public education by translating a number of Ciceronian orations into Italian and composing his Sommetta, a collection of letters for teaching ars dictaminis. Brunetto died in 1294 and was buried at Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence.
During his years of exile in France, Brunetto visited friars at Montpellier (according to Tesoretto, ll. 2,539–45) and wrote notarial letters at Paris (September 1263) and Bar-sur-Aube (April 1264) that are probably to be associated with the commercial fairs that drew many Italians on business. He may have lived in Paris, but it seems more likely he lived among Italian notaries and moneylenders in Arras: his encyclopaedic Tresor was composed and dictated in the Picard dialect of this region. Brunetto’s two most important and influential works were written in France. The Italian Tesoretto, a dream poem indebted to the first part of the Roman de la Rose, ends incomplete after 2,944 lines. The didactic ambitions of this work, which are cramped by its seven-syllable couplets, are satisfied by the Livres dou tresor, an encyclopedic compilation in French prose. In a celebrated passage in the first chapter, Brunetto explains his choice of the vernacular, appealing to his present circumstances and the widespread popularity of French: Et se aucuns demandoit pour quoi cis livres est escris en roumanç, selonc le raison de France, puis ke nous somes italien, je diroie que c’est pour .ii. raisons, l’une ke nous somes en France, l’autre por çou que la parleure est plus delitable et plus commune a tous langages (1.1.7). (“And if anyone should ask why this book is written in Romance according to the usage of the French, even though we are Italian, I would say that there are two reasons: one, that we are in France, the other, that French is more pleasant and has more in common with all other languages.”)
Although the Tresor is written in French, Brunetto explains that it is designed to assist those wishing to serve an Italian commune rather than a French king (3.73.5–6). Its three books observe a distinction between theoretical (Book 1) and practical (Books 2 and 3) philosophy that derives from Eustratius’s Greek commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics, Their contents (with major sources in parentheses) are as follows: Book 1, theology (Isidore of Seville), universal history (Bible, Isidore of Seville, Paulus Orosius, Peter Comestor, Geoffrey of Viterbo, Honorius of Autun), physics (Gossoiun, Image du monde; Roman de Sidrac); geography (Solinus); agriculture and house building (Palladius); natural history (Solinus; Physiologus; Ambrose; Isidore; De bestiis); Book 2, ethics and econom-ics (Herman the German’s Compendium Alexandrinum; Isidore; French translation of William of Conches, Moralium dogma philosophorum; Martin of Braga, De quattuor virtutibus; Albertano of Brescia, Ars loquendi et tacendi; Peraldus, Summa aurea de virtutibus); Book 3, rhetoric (Cicero, De inventione; Boethius, De rhetoricae cognitione; Li fet des Romains), politics (Oculus pastoralis; John of Viterbo, De regimine civitatum; official documents of the Commune of Siena).
Brunetto’s compilatio surpasses its models in its simplicity and in its choice of important passages. The Tresor was extremely popular and survives in seventy-three manuscripts. An Italian translation called the Tesoro, once attributed to Bono Giamboni but now regarded as Brunetto’s own work, survives in forty-four manuscripts, and there are versions in Latin, Provençal, Castilian, Catalan, and Aragonese.
The Tresor’s first critics were its scribes, who were often moved to amend its style and doctrine; some families of manuscripts contain extensive interpolations. Several Tresor manuscripts reached England: Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester (murdered 1397), owned a copy, and John Gower used the Tresor’s discussion of rhetoric in his Confessio Amantis. The poet Alain Chartier, the chronicler Aimery du Peyrat, and the compilers of the Leys d’amors all made good use of the Tresor. But its most famous reader was Dante Alighieri, who acknowledges Brunetto in Inferno 15 as one who taught him come l’uom s’etterna (“how man makes himself eternal,” l. 85); Brunetto speaks of his Tesoro as the work nel qual io vivo ancora (“in which I still live,” 1. 120).
