Li Livres dou Tresor

Li Livres dou Tresor. By Brunetto Latini. Edition and study by Spurgeon Baldwin and Paul Barrette. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003. Pp. 392.

The Italian notary, statesman, and author Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220-1294) was the son of a prominent Florentine family, a member of the Guelph political party, and apparently a lifelong political insider. In 1260, when banned from Florence after the rival Ghibelline party seized power, the polymathic Brunetto fled to France, where he spent seven years in exile. During that time he composed-in French, rather than in Italian-Li Livres dou Tresor (The Book of the Treasure), the richest and most intriguing of his four known works. At some point after the Ghibellines' defeat in 1266 he returned to Florence, where at a date subsequent to 1267 he completed an expanded, definitive edition of the text. This didactic work survives, both in its original French as well as in translation, in a large number of manuscripts and several early printed books, suggesting that it was a useful and important text for readers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Brunetto compiled Li Livres dou Tresor, a dictionary-like compendium in prose, by borrowing heavily from a host of Classical sources and the Bible. The book's first section examines a diverse group of topics in the following order: philosophy; Biblical history; medieval political history; astronomy; geography; and zoology. The second section is concerned with ethics, and draws chiefly from Artistotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but also features extracts from a number of other Classical, Biblical, and medieval sources. In the third and final section, Brunetto treats rhetoric, guided by Cicero's belief that mastery of the art of persuasive speech is essential to good government. After mining the Roman's De Inventione for its scrupulous analysis of rhetoric, and sampling from other sources, Brunetto concludes by borrowing from antecedent texts to craft a sort of primer on good governance, presenting it in a tutorial, case-study form enriched by examples from his own lifetime. Li Livres dou Tresor is distinguished by Brunetto's clear organization and user-friendly system of textual subdivisions, his panoramic erudition, his straightforward style, and his decision to compose his compendium in a vernacular language rather than in Latin.

Spurgeon Baldwin and Paul Barrette, who a decade ago completed the first full English translation of Li Livres dou Tresor (New York: Garland, 1993), have now produced what is, remarkably, only the third modern critical edition of Brunette's masterpiece, following those of Polycarpe Chabaille (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1863) and Francis Carmody (Berkeley: U of California P, 1948, rpt. 1975). For this new edition, Baldwin and Barrette have selected a base text, Manuscript L.II.3 of the Escorial Library near Madrid, that is different from those of their predecessors. They have also written a detailed introduction (pp.ix-li) that clearly presents the daunting textual-criticism issues that surround Li Livres dou Tresor, and that lays out their prudent strategy for establishing a new critical edition of the work. The end result of their efforts is, in my judgment, an edition that-by virtue of its lucid introduction, its uncluttered page design, its discriminating attention to variants, and of course the fascinating nature and scope of Brunette's text-will be of great utility and interest to modern scholars. (PAUL CREAMER, Columbia University)

(PAUL CREAMER, Columbia University)

Copyright Romanic Review May 2004
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