SOURCE: Barrette, Paul, and Spurgeon Baldwin. Introduction to Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure (Li Livres dou Tresor), translated by Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin, pp. vii-xvii. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Barrette and Baldwin survey Brunetto's life as well as the structure, content, and textual history of his The Book of the Treasure.

It is fair to say that the name of Brunetto Latini will be familiar to most modern readers only because he was Dante's teacher; in the well-known passage in Canto 15 of the Inferno Dante remembers him with affection, but nevertheless condemns him to suffer among the Sodomites. The actual nature of his transgression has long been a matter of controversy, but we will not attempt to deal with the history of scholarly speculation here, and there is very little material in The Book of the Treasure which could conceivably shed...