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Coluccio Salutati's View of the History of the Latin

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Coluccio Salutati's View of the History of the Latin COLUCCIO SALUTATI’S VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE Christopher S. Celenza Coluccio Salutati’s conception of the history of the Latin language evolved in a context of conversation and debate. The discussions within which his thoughts on this problem are found are contained in a series of letters from the last decade of the fourteenth century and the first decade of the fifteenth.1 The 1390s saw Salutati emerge as the center of Florentine humanism, a father figure around whom Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and a number of other young members of Florence’s next intellectual generation gathered. Since 1375, Salutati had held the post of Chancellor of Florence, a very powerful position in Florence’s republican government, which made him in effect Florence’s chief letter-writer and as such one of its principal diplomatic presences, as the republic dealt with domestic and foreign matters. Salutati stuck to traditional medieval forms of address in his public correspondence; politics was no place for innovation.2 Yet his private letters manifest many of his most definitive statements on problems, such as the nature of the Latin language, that became the subject of sharper and more focused discussions in the dec- ades to come. One of the most important, if not always overtly articulated, problems of the “long fifteenth century,” from the time when Petrarch (1304–74) was in his full maturity to the 1520s, had to do with the nature of the Latin 1 The following abbreviations will be employed in this study: Salutati, Epistolario = Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario, ed. F. Novati, 4 vols, Fonti per la storia d’Italia 15–18 (Rome, 1891–1911); McLaughlin, Imitation = M. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford, 1995); Witt, Hercules = R.G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, NC, 1983); Witt, Footsteps = R.G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden, 2003). Recent litera- ture on Salutati can be found in R. Cardini, P. Viti, eds., Coluccio Salutati e Firenze: Ideologia e formazione dello Stato (Florence, 2008); T. DeRobertis, G. Tanturli, and S. Zamponi, Coluccio Salutati e l’invenzione dell’umanesimo (Florence, 2008). 2 See R.G. Witt, Coluccio Salutati and his Public Letters (Geneva, 1976), and McLaughlin, Imitation, 67–78. 6 christopher s. celenza language and its utility as an instrument of culture.3 Humanists in the immediate generation after Salutati began gradually to amass evidence, from sources like Varro, Cicero’s Brutus, and Aulus Gellius, to name just some, that ancient Roman Latin had been a natural, rather than an artifi- cial, language: a tongue learned from birth which possessed different degrees of refinement, naturally enough, but one that was employed by wide varieties of the ancient populace, whose social strata possessed vastly differing levels of education. Another way of putting this (as Silvia Rizzo has done) is that, in discovering that ancient Roman Latin had once been a living language, fifteenth-century humanists discovered that Latin was also a dead language, learned in their own day only though formal education.4 As that debate came to an end, there seemed two avenues for Latin and its use: on the one hand, there was the use of an eclectic but classically based Latin as a kind of code. This was the choice, to give one example, of Angelo Poliziano, whose deliberately eclectic Latin style concealed both deep learning and the expansion of the Latin canon that the fifteenth cen- tury, now behind him, had achieved. On the other, there was the use of a basically Ciceronian prose, classicizing enough to be respectable by now evolved Renaissance standards, but uniform enough that it could serve as an instrument of culture translatable across the newly emerging sover- eign states of western Europe. The year 1540, when Alessandro Citolini wrote, in defense of the vernacular, that “Latin is dead and buried in books,” was still far away in Salutati’s day.5 Salutati’s thoughts, however, have an important place in the history of how Latin was perceived. One of Salutati’s correspondents, the well-regarded educator, notary, and diplomat Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna, had been a student of Salutati’s mentor, Pietro da Moglio, perhaps the foremost Italian teacher 3 For literature on this problem, see C.S. Celenza, “End Game: Humanist Latin in the Late Fifteenth Century,” in Y. Maes, J. Papy, W. Verbaal, eds., Latinitas Perennis II: Appropriation and Latin Literature (Leiden, 2009), pp. 201–42; especially important is M. Tavoni, Latino, grammatica, volgare: Storia di una questione umanistica (Padua, 1984). See also C.S. Celenza, “Petrarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (2005), 509–36. 4 See S. Rizzo, Ricerche sul latino umanistico (Rome, 2002), pp. 75–86. 5 Alessandro Citolini, Lettera in difesa della lingua volgare (Venice, 1551; original publication date 1540), 6r; see M. Faithfull, “The Concept of ‘Living Language’ in Cincquecento Vernacular Philology,” Modern Language Review 48 (1953), 278–82, at 281; M. Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 204–08; Celenza, “Endgame,” pp. 240–41..
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