The following list comprises eleven works which were perceived by their contemporaries as anthologies of facetiae and which heavily influenced laterjoke collections. From 1344, when Petrarch revived the Classical facetia tradition based on Cicero and Quintilian, to 1528 when Castiglione drew on Cicero's joke theory for his laughing courtier, each collection offacetiae (though never “original” in our sense of the term) had a different purpose and a different tone. From the 1530s on the joke-books were collective, drawing often literally on a mixture of sources and including the large and very popular compilations of Gast (1541) and Domenichi (1548).

Like many humanists of the late fifteenth century, Cristoforo Landino (1425-1498) came to consider himself not only a rhetorician but a speculative philosopher as well. Like many of these same humanists, Landino would not allow himself to peddle the merely fashionable: he pretended that he had been drinking from philosophical founts since his youth. In his dialogue De anima, completed about 1471, Landino suggested that from the early 1450s he not only was receiving systematic training in natural philosophy from Carlo Marsuppini but also was learning some Plato from the teenager Marsilio Ficino.