Coluccio Salutati's Critique of Astrology in the Context of His Natural Philosophy

Abstract

Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) is best known as the Petrarchan humanist chancellor of Florence, defender by his rhetoric of the Florentine cause against Visconti Milan, and influential patron of the inauguration of Hellenic studies in Italy and of intensified study and imitation of classical texts. He was also by his own studies, writing, book collection, and personal contacts conversant with at least some of the medieval scholastic traditions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although it might be too much to call him either a natural philosopher or a theologian, his interest in these subjects was deep. The following essay examines major lines of his thinking concerning nature and divine operation through nature in this world as they are put forth in his De fato et fortuna of 1396.1 It culminates in an analysis of the important critique of astrology presented in that work. The late fourteenth century was notable not only for a profusion of apologetic and practical astrological writings but also for the anti-astrological treatises of the scholastic natural philosophers and theologians Nicole Oresme and Henry of Langenstein. Although Salutati does not seem to have been influenced by these writings, his own work is parallel to them in certain respects and should be included in this anti-astrological genre.2