On the World and Religious Life By Coluccio SalutatiTranslated by Tina MarshallI Tatti Renaissance LibraryHarvard University Press, 2014 Harvard’s invaluable I Tatti Renaissance Library presents yet another vital Renaissance text in its first-ever translation into English, in this case Colluccio Salutati’s De seculo et religione, here translated by Tina Marshall with an Introduction by Ronald Witt.Like so many of the great Renaissance humanists (most certainly including Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most famous of them all during his own lifetime), Salutati’s name will be unfamiliar to most modern readers, as unthinkable as that would have been to the readers of his day. He was born in 1332 and worked at a variety of political and diplomatic posts throughout his twenties while he perfected his Latin and befriended some of the prominent literary men of his time, including Boccaccio. In 1375 he became Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, a position hewing as close as anything in Renaissance times to that of “First Citizen” of the old Roman Republic. He was the face of the city at official functions, the mind of the city in deploying its military and diplomatic strategies, and even the soul of the city in his singular combination of humanist studies and real-world power.But more than anything he was the voice of the city: his official letters and dispatches, composed in some of the most powerful and impeccable Latin prose since the age of Cicero, quickly became legendary things, at once penetratingly focused on the business at hand and sometimes soaringly digressive.Salutati held his position for thirty years, through war and peace and intrigue and triumph, and the whole time he was also ceaselessly active in his personal life. He married a lovely young woman and had a large family, and he read voraciously, amassing one of the biggest personal libraries of his era. He was not only a lover of books but also their champion, defending the study of the ancient classics against a Church hierarchy intent on disparaging them in favor of Christian writings (he debated learned churchmen on the subject, and the debates could be thrilling – they would be hits on YouTube today).He was, in other words, a thoroughgoing man of the world, both a passionate humanist and a dedicated public servant. He seems the least likely candidate to engage in the popular de contemptu mundi genre of polemics popular at the time, where writers would excoriate the sins and excesses of the material world - Salutati knew as much of those sins and excesses as any man living, after all, and he wouldn’t have traded them for all the virtues in the hymnal.But he loved writing, loved the flowing, shaping challenge of it, and this particular sample of de contemptu mundi, his early 1380s work De seculo et religione, was a commission for a friend. Niccolo Lapi, a former canon of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, decided in February of 1379 to join the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, taking both the clerical name of Jerome and vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty. He asked his friend Salutati to write him a de contemptu mundi treatise in order to reassure him, effectively, that he hadn’t made a self-evidently insane life-choice.After a bit of delay (he was, as noted, a busy man), he set to his task with the same explosive rhetorical energy he brought to everything he wrote, and here’s where the Latinate reader’s gaze falls nervously on any translator. But after only a few pages, Tina Marshall proves herself capable of quite a few rhetorical explosions of her own. It’s hard to see how this very first English translation of “On the World and Religious Life” could be bettered; it catches the lilting joy of Salutati’s prose in all sections of the work:

The Enemy, then, incites us to catch us; the world delights us to deceive us; the flesh flatters us to infect us; but God admonishes us to receive us. Whom, then, will you follow, wretched man, pitiable man? Will you despise your Creator, who receives you, and will you mimic the creature that is leading you to your doom?

Salutati runs through a fairly standard catalogue of the world’s evils, and the more he works up a head of steam, the more you start to wonder just what it is you’re reading. Here’s a document emphatically renouncing all the joys of the secular world, and yet the text is going in the wrong direction – not only from a politician to a monk but from an exceedingly worldly politician to a monk. Any reader paying attention will start to wonder if they’re being fed a bill of goods.It’s on Ronald Witt’s mind in his Introduction, and he addresses it head on:

Was the De seculo et religione only a kind of elaborate declamatio? Salutati wrote a number of works in this genre in the form of separate speeches speaking for and against a certain proposition. But these declamations were undisguised rhetorical exercises, whereas in the De seculo et religione, Salutati clearly intended the reader to interpret the work as if the author believed in the arguments presented. Of course, this could be viewed as part of the rhetorical dressing. Yet in a matter of such religious significance, this approach would have been inexcusable. Salutati was a born debater and loved to win arguments. But there was more involved in his motivation for writing the work.

It’s a fine bit of investigation, but is it perhaps a smidge naïve? The old masters knew something of sarcasm (in a world ruled by theocrats and lacking dental care or air conditioning, sarcasm often felt downright necessary), and it’s just faintly possible that Salutati is having a little more fun than his I Tatti custodians are willing to grant him. If you read his excoriations watching for a twinkle in his eye, some of those passages can convey the occasional inexcusable thing:

The earliest age has taught us just how easily these needs can be satisfied: we read that people satisfied hunger with acorns, suppressed thirst with water, drove off chills with pelts, and avoided rainstorms, winds, and heat by means of caves and hollows. This is that most innocent age; the poets extolled it with many praises and called it golden or Saturnian. Blessed acorns! Wholesome rivers! At that time the poisons of sizzling food did not excite lust by its warmth; drooping drunkenness most like insanity did not assault the brain; there was no dispute with neighbor over boundaries or sovereign rule. All things were held in common.

Blessed acorns! Wholesome rivers! Ah, Salutati – welcome to English.