At various points he calls upon, to select only a few of almost countless examples, the twelfth-century moralist Peter the Chanter, Dante's thirteenth-century friend Brunetto Latini, the fourteenth-century poets William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, the fifteenth-century essayists Leon Battista Alberti and Christine de Pizan and the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, and the sixteenth-century satirists Francois Rabelais and Pietro Aretino.

Prior to the Quattrocento, writers such as Albertino Mussato and Brunetto Latini wrote that the growth of private wealth was a corrupting force in private life.

Similar creatures were portrayed by other medieval notables, for example, by Albertus Magnus (De Animalibus 22:2,1) and Brunetto Latini (Tresor 5:59).