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