Aldobrandino da Siena, La Sanità del Corpo: volgarizzato da Zucchero Bencivenni. Problemas textuales y traducción

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

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