Abstract

Coluccio Salutati 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