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).
David J.Wallace
[See also: IMAGE DU MONDE; SIDRAC, ROMAN DE]
Brunetto Latini. Li livres dou tresor de Brunetto Latini, ed. Francis J.Carmody. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1947.
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