Chapter 3: Dante’s Schooling, Dante’s Library

Dante’s guardian, Brunetto Latino, educated in turn by his father, Bonaccursus Latinus, in Fiesole’s La Lastra, was proficient in Latin texts on oratory, translating speeches, then in exile began to write his Rettorica in Italian prose for a rich banker, a fellow Florentine, while also composing the likewise incomplete Tesoretto in verse, initially as a diplomatic present to Alfonso X el Sabio, candidate for Holy Roman Emperor, a text he later recycled for his Republican students in Florence. In that northern French exile he had come under the influence of the Chartrian Neo-Platonists and their followers, the two authors, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, of the Roman de la Rose, who made use of the autobiographical dream vision form as a frame tale for encyclopedic pedagogy. Brunetto follows suit, describing himself as lost from the true path at the news given him in the Pass of Roncesvalles of the defeat of Montaperti and his consequent exile, from which he wanders into a dream landscape where Natura, the allegorical Virtues, Ovid, and Ptolemy proceed to teach him—and with him the regal, imperial, republican, and democratic readers of his text, who include ourselves—wisdom