Poggio Bracciolini, GIAN FRANCESCO, a famous Italian humanist, was born in 1380 at Terranova in Florence. He studied Latin under John of Ravenna, and Greek under Manuel Chrysoloras, and early gained the notice of the Florentine scholars for his skill in copying MSS. About 1402 he became a secretary to the Roman curia; but, though the fifty years of his service covered a period of remarkable importance, he seems to have taken no interest whatever in the movement of church affairs, but to have been devoted heart and soul to the resuscitation of classical learning. In the course of his duties at the Council of Constance (1414-18) he explored the Swiss and Swabian convents for MSS., and later in his wider travels to England and elsewhere he never lost sight of the dearest interest of his life. He was able to recover MSS. of Quintilian, Ammianus Marcellinus, Lucretius, Silius Italicus, Vitruvius, and many other Roman authors. About 1452 he retired to Florence, and next year succeeded Carlo Aretino as historiographer to the republic. Here he died in 1459. His writings include Letters (best ed. by Tonelli, 3 vols. Flor. 1832-61); moral essays On Nobility, On the Infelicity of Princes, On Marriage in Old Age (he himself in 1435 took to wife a girl of eighteen), and the like; a rhetorical Latin History of Florence, in imitation of Livy; a series of unclean and unscrupulous polemical invectives against contemporaries, especially Filelfo and Valla; and a poor translation into Latin of Xenophon's Cyropædia. But his most famous book is the Libri Facetiarum, a collection of humorous and not too decent stories and jests, written in fair Latin, and full of merry raillery at the expense of the monks and secular clergy. The book has some importance in the study of the diffusion and development of folk-tales, and here Poggio takes a place with Straparola, Morlini, Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and Bandello, between the later couteurs who have borrowed or worked up their stories on the one hand, and such earlier storehouses as the Exempla, the Disciplina Clericalis, the Aurea Legenda, the Gesta Romanorum, and the Fabliaux on the other. A good edition (Fr. trans. and text) is that of Isidore Lisieux (Paris, 1878).
See the Life by Dr Shepherd; also Voigt's Wiedergebgebung des classischen Alterthums, and Symonds' Renaissance in Italy.