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The Year of Leonardo Bruni's Birth and Methods for Determining the Ages of Humanists Born in the Trecento

SINCE the early part of our century, scholars have been unable to agree on the date of Leonardo Bruni's birth. For more than four hundred and fifty ears, from the official funeral oration of the Florentine republic in 1444 to about 1900, it was assumed that Bruni was born in 1370, 1369, or, possibly, 1368. That is, for all practical purposes there was a near consensus of opinion, first among Bruni's friends and later among Bruni scholars.1 In this respect Bruni seems more fortunate than many contemporary humanists, because the latter part of the fourteenth century, even in Italy, has left a poor harvest of chronological records on the youth of those not blessed at birth with predictions of a great future; and there were relatively few whose lives, like Bruni's, were scrutinized in their city-patria after their deaths and presented to a broad public in speeches and chronicles. Too often in the case of writers of that period there was, and still is, no other way for critical scholarship but to establish an approximate date of birth by comparing the ages of near and quasi-contemporaries and to hook uncertain birth dates to whatever firm documentary evidence is found for others. Although Leonardo Bruni is one of those early humanists whose biographies were handed down by friends and disciples with exact chronological indications concerning their ages, the delicate and slippery method of comparing age differences between coeval humanists has since the early part of our century played a role even in Bruni studies; and it has led to a rather widespread distrust of the assertions of Bruni's friends and disciples. There is no denying that we arrive or seem to arrive at quite different results according to whether we rely on the information circulating in Florence in Bruni's time or compare Bruni's age with the known, or apparently known, birth dates of some of his contemporaries. The most perplexing discrepancy of this sort is created by Bruni's memoirs,