52) Guarino's name became associated with Ferrarese culture, and a circle gathered around him, as in the case of other powerful Renaissance intellectuals close to official patronage, like Coluccio Salutati and Marsilio Ficino.

Florence's chancellor and champion of the anti-papal cause, Coluccio Salutati, was forced to "articulate a fuller and more complex vision of Italian liberty," (188-89), a vision to which Leonardo Bruni in the early fifteenth century could remain faithful even as he deliberately excised from his History of the Florentine People important expressions of anti-papal sentiment.

A celebrated Dominican preacher, an important diplomat at the Council of Constance, a founder of the Corpus Domini convent in Venice, and a friend to Coluccio Salutati and Francesco Datini as well as a mentor to Archbishop Antoninus of Florence, he was intimately involved in the political and religious affairs of early Renaissance Italy.