ABSTRACT
Laurent de Premierfait was a humanist, a noted Latin poet and the well-known translator of Cicero, Livy, Boccaccio, and Aristotle. Laurent's translations have received attention, but their illustrations have rarely been studied systematically as active components of the manuscripts that contain them. Cicero's De senectute is the first translation in which Laurent both explicitly acknowledges the difference between an author's Latin original and his French translation and in which he employs a series of images to aid the translation. Laurent's translation of Cicero in 1405 was the first place his initial failure with Boccaccio's De casibus where he attempted such a conversion of Latin into French. The focus on education, on training young men, and on the wisdom of Louis of Bourbon in the text and images of BnF, ms lat. 7789 marks the first instance of Laurent's experimentation with employing visual imagery in the service of the translation of the ancient past to the late medieval present.
