Aldobrandino da Siena, la Sanità del Corpo. Volgarizzato da Zucchero Bencivenni. Textual Problems and Translation

Abstract

In the first decades of the fourteenth century, the vulgar had beenrelegated mainly to purely practical issues. The text we will study dealswith everyday issues concerning health, so it was important to use thevulgar, since a medical treaty written in Latin could have reached fewerpeople. For this reason, Zucchero Bencivenni wanted to carry out thevulgarization of that treaty. At the beginning of this specific"vulgarization", which has been translated "di lingua franzese infiorentina", he does not speak of "vulgar" but of Florentine, since at thetime the terms the terms "volgare, Florentine, Tuscan, Italian” were usedalmost interchangeably because the disputes that would clarify thedifferences between them had not yet arisen.

In our analysis we will try to solve some textual problems, especiallyrelated to certain names of plants and diseases that might be due to theauthor trying to translate from French to Italian.