Salutati's Opinion of Non-Italian Latin Writers of the Middle Ages

Abstract

Coluccio Salutati, along with Petrarch, is generally looked upon as one of the principal founders of Italian humanism and the Renaissance movement. Professor Berthold Ullman states in his excellent and latest work on Salutati that the renowned chancellor of Florence ‘was second to Petrarch in the humanistic movement, but not far behind'; he points out that Coluccio was the acknowledged leader of this movement for some thirty-two years, from the time of Petrarch's death in 1374 until the chancellor's own in 1406. Vergerio hails Salutati as the leading philosopher of the age; for Antonio Loschi he was the outstanding Latin writer of his time. His reputation as a Latin stylist and moralist, already in the fourteenth century, had spread far beyond the borders of Italy.