Salutati’s public obligations and advancing age did nothing to impede his intellectual and writing activities (Entry n. 43) . They included extensive correspondence with the leading figures of Italian and European culture, De laboribus Herculis, a work of classical erudition and medieval interpretation, and writings on critical subjects, such as De seculo et religione, De fato et fortuna, De nobilitate legum et medicine, De tyranno and the so-called Invectiva in Antonium Luschum.

Some of these works allow us to reconstruct the thoughts and deep-seated convictions of the elderly Salutati. The Invectiva in Antonium Luschum is a response to an ideological attack against his homeland—but as a citizen rather than chancellor; the letter to the Camaldolese monk Giovanni da San Miniato, on behalf of his pupil Angelo Corbinelli, is a vigorous defence of classical poetry and its study; the letter to the Dominican Giovanni Dominici in response to the latter’s Lucula noctis—and also the last of Salutati’s epistles—clearly and decisively sets out the parameters of Humanism.