La semantica di peuple nel linguaggio di Brunetto Latini

Brunetto Latini's Tresor is an encyclopaedia in which the weight of political or civil science is very strong. This clear choice of content is matched by a linguistic choice, that of writing in French, not at all unusual among the writers of central-northern Italy in the thirteenth century, and which poses an interesting problem: the relationship between 'political language' and 'literary language', where the first term simply means the political code that the second conveys. The essay intends to observe the choice to use the 'lingua franca' of the moment - the Old French, in fact - to verify possible forms of conditioning exerted by the linguistic vector on the semantics declined within the Tresor. In particular, we are dealing with a preliminary survey concerning the use of the word peuple (or pueple). If in Italy popolus/popolo expresses, in the central decades of the 13th century, both the idea of the unitary community and the image of the part of society that is organizing and establishing itself in competition with the commune of milites, does the use of Old French introduces significant semantic variants? Does it constitute a linguistically conditioning vector?