Benedetto Cotrugli – The Book of the Art of Trade: With Scholarly Essays from Niall Ferguson, Giovanni Favero, Mario Infelise, Tiziano Zanato and Vera Ribaudo

This previously obscure 1450s Italian book, now first translated in English, is cited in Niall Ferguson's best seller THE TOWER AND THE SQUARE. It's a fascinating view into the mind of a very smart Italian merchant of the 1450s. He felt that law, philosophy, and theology were far advanced, but that business training was a slipshod mess. It's like MBA 101 for the 1450s. Several modern essays accompany the original.Much is made of the new translation to English. Hmmm. Let me say, it must be the type of translation, that stays very close, we can observe, to the syntax of the original, because many sentences are a paragraph long, with innumerable commas, which is not normal English, but more like 1800s German, and any speaker of English could, one might say, with the least effort, have broken up these run-on Latinate sentences, into three or four sentences, of normal English length, with much ease, rendering the original, must easier to read, for the relief of the modern English reader, of today (and with pnly a bit more effort, could declutter the syntax of its verbose and wordy Shakespearean detail and ornamentation and reduplication), although I will note here, that I have given the book a review of five stars, to its praise, nonetheless.