Coexistence and contamination of vernacular and Latin in Alessandro Braccesi’s bilingual tribute to Camilla Saracini : the literatures of Siena and Florence between illustrious women and Neoplatonism

Abstract

In October 1491 the Florentine envoy to Siena, Alessandro Braccesi (1445-1503), composed and dedicated two sonnets in the vernacular and one Latin carmen to Camilla Saracini, who had recently and suddenly become blind. In Siena vernacular poetry was the norm and the production of literary texts in Latin was progressively dying out. Braccesi brought with him a multifaceted Florentine heritage: in his hometown the endorsement of the Tuscan vernacular followed a tortuous path, side by side with a flourishing Neo-Latin literature. This paper is articulated in four sections. First, I shed light on Braccesi’s humble background by using archival material; I then discuss his bilingual literary production, with a focus on his translations from Latin into the vernacular. In the second part, I examine the poems for Camilla and provide the texts with a critical apparatus. The cultural context of Florence and the links to Neoplatonism are explored in the third section, in which I discuss the four letters that accompanied the poem. In the fourth section, with a cursory glance at the literary tradition of the praise of illustrious women that developed in Siena, I propose a further reading of Braccesi’s poems.