Brunetto Latini and the animals of the Tresor
Dante's teacher wrote an encyclopedia in French, the Tresor, which gives ample space to animals: its sources, method and differences from bestiaries.
In Canto XV of the Inferno Dante meets among the sodomites his former teacher, who before leaving commends one thing alone to him: ‘Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro, nel qual io vivo ancora’, let my Treasure, in which I still live, be commended to you. That teacher is Brunetto Latini, a Florentine notary and politician, and the Treasure is Li Livres dou Tresor, a vast encyclopedia written in French in the 1260s. Its pages contain one of the fullest descriptions of the animal world produced by a layman in the Middle Ages.
A Florentine in exile
Brunetto was born in Florence around 1220 and was a leading figure in the public life of the Guelph commune. In 1260, while he was on a mission to the king of Castile, news arrived of the defeat at Montaperti, which handed the city to the Ghibellines. For some years he lived in exile in France, and it was during that period that he composed the Tresor. Back in Florence after the political change of the later 1260s, he again held important offices until his death in 1294.
The choice of language is explained by the author himself. He wrote in French, he says, because he was in France and because that speech seemed to him ‘plus delitable et plus commune a toutes gens’, more delightful and more common to all people. The Tresor was therefore addressed to a broad public of educated laymen, merchants, judges and men of government, rather than to the clerics of the schools.
The place of animals in the work
The encyclopedia is divided into three books. The first deals with sacred and secular history, cosmology, geography and nature; the second with ethics, on the basis of Aristotle; the third with rhetoric and the government of cities. Animals appear in the first book, arranged as fish, serpents, birds and quadrupeds, in a sequence reminiscent of the Latin encyclopedias.
Brunetto draws above all on Solinus, on Ambrose’s Hexameron and on Isidore of Seville, and through them on Pliny. Much of his information matches that of the bestiaries: the beaver that mutilates itself to survive, the sharp-eyed lynx, the pelican, the panther, the unicorn. Alongside these come more practical notes, for instance on horses, dogs and hunting birds, reflecting the interests of an aristocratic and urban readership.
Less allegory, more curiosity
What sets the Tresor apart from the monastic bestiaries is its tone. Christological interpretations do not vanish entirely, but they become rare; description and curiosity about the wonders of nature prevail. The animal is observed as part of an order of the world that the educated citizen should know, rather than as a figure to be deciphered for the salvation of the soul.
This shift signals a cultural change. In the thirteenth century encyclopedic knowledge was leaving the cloister and spreading through courts and communes, in the vernacular languages. Brunetto’s work was soon translated into Italian, in a version traditionally attributed to Bono Giamboni, although the attribution is disputed, and it circulated in numerous manuscripts.
The Tresor thus lets us see the bestiaries from a new angle. The same creatures that in the pages of the Physiologus preached the Passion become, in the encyclopedia of a Florentine notary, part of a civic and worldly body of knowledge. And Dante’s homage, in which the teacher speaks precisely of his book, shows how much that work mattered to the intellectuals of the next generation.