This article examines medieval translations of Ovid's Heroides by thirteenth-century Italian diplomat and notary Brunetto Latini. It explores how in two different works composed in the years 1260-1266, his French Tresor and his Italian Rettorica, Latini translates quotations from the Heroides so as to demonstrate the rhetorical strategies ...
This article examines medieval translations of Ovid's Heroides by thirteenth-century Italian diplomat and notary Brunetto Latini. It explores how in two different works composed in the years 1260-1266, his French Tresor and his Italian Rettorica, Latini translates quotations from the Heroides so as to demonstrate the rhetorical strategies most apt to persuade an audience and to obtain its goodwill. In fact, these quotations that Latini translates from the Heroides serve as didactic illustrations of what he considers to be effective rhetorical practice for the communal activities, ranging from public debate to diplomacy, in which notaries (including Latini himself) were most involved. This paper thus describes the quotation and translation of passages from the Heroides beyond the practice of literary allusion, providing an expanded perspective on medieval translation that transcends our modern binary of literary translation as utterly distinct from specialist translation. More important, it argues that Latini considered these literary-mythic Ovidian letters as models of rhetorically effective discourse vital for the administration and governing of the comune.
