Leonardo Bruni’s letters translated

Retreating – with what I consider to be commendable restraint – from the spring sunshine that is bathing the ever-breathtaking Rome, I have had chance to update the list of the lectures I have recently given. Any of you who cares to study it will notice that the latest addition was given this month and, indeed, explains why I have been forced to come to Rome in the middle of term. As I explained in the previous post, I was asked to speak at a conference at the École française, the theme of which was the networks which underpinned the development and circulation of humanist rhetoric; my particular remit was to talk about the diffusion of humanist miscellanies in England. All arch posturing aside, I did wonder whether I should have declined the invitation, falling as it does two weeks before teaching ends at the University of Essex, but I am very glad that I have made the trip. The conference was both a stimulating and a friendly event, and it is also included a presentazione of a new work which deserves to receive attention in those territories of the res publica litteraria which, when they are not discoursing in the Tullian tongue, are English-speaking.

That proposition might seem preposterous when I explain that the work in question includes a parallel translation in French alongside its Latin text but when the text is the epistolary of Leonardo Bruni, I think I can justify the assertion. Florentine chancellor, historian of his city, orator and reviver of Ciceronian Latin, Bruni was – and was acknowledged in his lifetime – as the pre-eminent scholar of the new studia humanitatis. His status was, in fact, demonstrated by a couple of quotations provided in a paper by Vera Tufano at the conference which I have just attended. Talking of Bartolomeo Fazio’s invective against his colleague (and, many would say, his better) Lorenzo Valla, she drew attention to Fazio’s assertion that his opponent was not worthy to be compared to Guarino da Verona and Leonardo Bruni, ‘the two lights and ornaments of Italy’. Those two figures, similar in age but so different in their intellectual formation and careers, were often coupled together by contemporaries, though their reputations were of a rather different construction one from the other. Some of Guarino’s writings, particularly his translations of Plutarch but also his orations, enjoyed a wide circulation, but he was better known for his status as a teacher – a status which, as I have recently argued, was shrewdly fabricated by himself and by his students. It might be said that Guarino was well-known for being well known, while Bruni spoke to audiences in all corners of Europe through his writings, his Laudatio Florentinae urbis, his Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, his historical texts and, more than anything, his translations, primarily from Aristotle but also from Plutarch and (as was demonstrated at the conference when Giancarlo Abbamonte spoke of Fazio) from Xenophon. And, what is to the point, integral to Bruni’s familiarity were his familiar letters.

Bruni himself, like his friend Poggio Bracciolini, took care late in his life to compile his personal correspondence into an epistolary, organised in eight books. Bruni’s death took place 570 years ago to the day, on 9^th March 1444; in its wake, Giannozzo Manetti supplemented  the epistolary with a further book of his former mentor’s last letters. In an elegant discussion which was part of the the presentazione, Stefano Baldassarri suggested we might muse on how far Manetti might have gone beyond simply adding to the letter-collection and consider whether he might also have edited Bruni’s Latin. However that may be, this nine-book edition had – as I mentioned in my own paper at the conference – a nearly immediate international circulation, one copy of it being made in London before the decade was done. The epistolary also appeared in print from the 1470s, but any ‘modern’ research on these letters turns to the seminal edition printed just under three hundred years after Bruni’s demise and which was the fruit of the labours of Lorenzo Mehus. That work was the basis for comments on revision compiled by F. P. Luiso at the beginning of the twentieth century, but not published until 1980, under the editorship of Lucia Gualdo Rosa. Yet, despite a plan involving Gualdo Rosa herself and Paolo Viti which saw the publication of a censimento of manuscripts of Bruni’s letters, and despite talk of a project based at the Scuola normale superiore in Pisa, there has not been a new critical edition of the Epistolae. It is one of those undertakings so large and so complex that its very importance becomes a barrier to its completion.

The new French publication is provided by Laurence Bernard-Pradelle, who has already established herself as a translator of Bruni with a 2008 collection of his works fit to stand alongside Paolo Viti’s parallel Latin-Italian volume of 1996. Her latest work does not claim to be the critical edition of the epistolario that we continue to await. Some might wonder, with the Mehus being available both on-line and in a recent reprint with an important introduction by James Hankins, what this new publication can add which will be of use to scholars. The answer is that the editor has consciously not based her work merely on Mehus but has taken into account that of Luiso and others, and incorporated the uncollected letters, the ‘extravaganti’, into her work (signifying their non-canonical status by the wise tactic of a typographical change, placing them in a smaller font size). What is more, she has added short introductions to each book, as well as a listing of manuscripts and an extensive bibliography, providing yet more scholarly value. In my judgement, in other words, we should apply Plato’s dictum that the best should not be the enemy of the good: let us wish for a fully critical edition but celebrate what we do now have, while the fairies who grant our wishes steel themselves for what even they will consider a bracing challenge.

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Major humanist resources on-line: the epistolaries of Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati

On a warm Sunday morning, when I should be tending to a garden which has become riotously overgrown, I can not take myself away from my desk. Working away, I noticed a reference to a recent publication of Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento: the letters of the acknowledged prince of humanists of the early quattrocento, Leonardo Bruni, in the eighteenth-century recension of Lorenzo Mehus, edited now by James Hankins. There is, it must be said, little on the web giving details of that new edition, but in my travels, I stumbled across a major resource provided by Google: an on-line and downloadable copy of the original Mehus edition itself. It is hard to overstate the significance of this. Not only was Bruni the pre-eminent humanist of his generation; the Mehus edition has defined work on his epistolary for over two centuries, as is demonstrated by the fact that the twentieth-century re-ordering of Bruni’s letters, by F. P. Luiso, edited by Lucia Gualdo Rosa and eventually published in 1980, necessarily re-inforces the status of Mehus even when it corrects and contradicts that edition.

I am not clear when this resource became available: the record says it was digitised in June 2007, but my previous searches have not discovered it and it is not yet listed in Dana Sutton’s indispensable listing of neo-latin texts on the web (he does list two incunable editions, one from 1487 and the other from 1495).  The Google images are not perfect. They are taken from a University of Michigan copy with interesting but sometimes illegible handwritten marginalia (their contributor seems not to be identified). It is in the nature of such an edition that cross-referencing between the indices and the text is difficult. But the whole text is there, including Mehus’ dedications — themselves an interesting reflection on the eighteenth-century res publica litterarum — and the funeral orations on Bruni by Manetti and Poggio Bracciolini. It would be wonderful to have a true on-line edition of these letters but let us not be greedy. What is more urgent is an on-line version of Luiso’s Studi sul epistolario. If that were available, a scholar would have from the web the fundamental requirements for studying Bruni’s epistles.

That discovery may have kept me away from the unkempt herbs and rose-bush for a few hours, but the plants were kept from being cut back for yet longer. I continued my deskbound search and realised that it was not only Bruni whose letters, in their standard edition, are now on-line. The same is the case for Bruni’s mentor and predecessor as chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati. The Novati edition appeared in print in 1911 and full images of that edition — more elegant than the Google Mehus  — are available on the Internet Archive.

So, both of these will be added to my own little list of humanist texts available on-line. But their presence, and more besides, really do mean I will have to re-organise how I present that information. After the gardening, of course.

UPDATE (2nd July 2009): these items have now been added to Dana Sutton’s listing of neo-Latin texts — a resource all the more impressive for being so responsive and so regularly updated. Thank you, Prof. Sutton!

POSTSCRIPT (11th July 2009): and in another testimony to the cosmopolitan nature of the virtual world, I hear from Dr Hans Ramminger of Munich of a rather more legible version — but without the intriguing marginalia — of Mehus’ edition, provided by the Royal Library of Copenhagen. I have updated the links at lower right of the home page accordingly.