TIL Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kins College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Republic of Letters, Italian Humanism.

At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old fogy, I'd like to complain that no one writes

letters anymore. When was the last time you got

one? Not an email, I mean, but something on paper in a stamped envelope, preferably handwritten.

A friend of mine who's a historian of the American Civil War once pointed out to me that experts on his chosen specialty have many 19th century letters to draw on in their research, whereas future historians of our present day may well curse the fact that our

correspondence took the form of ephemeral data, long deleted, or trapped in no longer

readable storage devices. Historians of philosophy too can learn a lot from letters.

Beginning in antiquity they were often written with a view to wider publication not only

for the private reading of one recipient.

Thus the letter or epistle has long been a popular form for writing philosophy, used by

Plato, Seneca, Peter Abilard, and Heluise, O'Kindi, and John Locke to name only a few.

Around the turn of the 15th century, the master of the letter was Coluccio Salutati.

He studied epistolary techniques called in Latin Arst dictaminis at the University of Bologna, where he obtained his degree in 1350 before becoming Chancellor of the Republican City of Florence in 1375.

As the Florentines contended with the papacy and rival cities, such as Milan,

Salutati's elegant letters were the most powerful weapon in a war of words.

Famously, the Milanese Duke Jan Galiazzo Visconti remarked that one letter of Salotatis was worth a troop of horses. Not that Salotatis audience would necessarily

have been capable of understanding his high-flown Latin, but his rhetoric did honor to his city

and lent dignity to any diplomatic occasion.

Salutati's style was not only about being stylish.

Alongside state business, he was in the business of carrying on the tradition of Italian humanism.

I say carrying on rather than beginning that tradition, because as Salutati himself would have been the first to point out,

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