The first complete English translation of a compendium of classical material by the 13th-century teacher of Dante. The genre, popular for nearly a millennium, was dying out by then, but the popularity of Brunetto's work lies in its being in vernacular French (rather than in Latin), and its skillful

First published in 1993. Part of a library on Medieval Literature this volume is a translated version of 'The Book of the Treasure' by Brunetto Latini, who was a teacher of Dante and is remembered in Dante's Inferno in Canto 15. The Book of the Treasure is a compendium of primarily classical material, following in a long tradition of such collections, with origins in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a genre which was finally to die in the Renaissance, when especially the scientific knowledge contained in these pale and corrupt reflections of classical wisdom could no longer compete with the superior scientific material from the Muslim world which began to make its way into Christian Europe as early as the 11th century.