Brunetto a Babele: l’animale politico e parlante sulla pianura del Senaar

Abstract

The essay deals with the representation of

Babel in the Livres dou Tresor by Brunetto Latini (1260-

1266), and illustrates the way in which the biblical epic is

rewritten and partially overwritten by the topos of the political

and speaking animal, proper to classical political

thought. Indeed Brunetto’s Babel provides an early and

excellent example of the difficulty to articulate these two

visions of history and political-anthropological models, a

problem which rises in medieval western culture particularly

between the 13th and the 14th century. The historical

synthesis offered in the first book of the Tresor is traditional

only in appearance: in fact Brunetto distanced

himself from the medieval Latin and Romance traditions

because of the absence of any negative moral and theological

judgment about Nembroth. Not accidentally, the

other two mentions of the episode, in the third book, occupy

key-places in the general architecture of Brunetto’s

encyclopaedia: here the biblic epic is gradually bent on

the Ciceronian paradigm of institution of politics and

Babel becomes the place of « diversité », with no negative

connotation, of languages as well as of forms of government.