Book of the Twelve Sages

Book of the Twelve Sages (1237). The Book of the Twelve Sages, or Treaty of Nobility and Loyalty, is one of the earliest works of the didactic prose of Spanish medieval literature (The Book of the Twelve Sages or Tract of Nobility and Loyalty) .

The book is a treatise on "education of princes" commanded to compose, apparently, on the initiative of Fernando III the Saint to 1237 (as we are told in the Book ...) and to which a prologue was added in 1255, at the beginning of the reign of Alfonso X the Wise. In any case, the body of the work dates from the second quarter of the thirteenth century and brings together two types of materials: an oriental type frame, in which a group of learned sages elaborate a knowledge of doctrinal type, destined to the king's infants Fernando, extracting a speculum principis (mirror of princes) of moral character; and a series of sentences expressed by these twelve wise men that conform a sapiential or gnomic treatise, related with the Flowers of philosophy, the Bonium or Bocados of gold and Poridat of poridades. Home

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