Coluccio Salutati and Augustine's City of God offers a fascinating analysis of how the Florentine humanist Salutati across his literary career read and used Augustine's pivotal work. Urlings rejects arguments that viewed Salutati as an inconsistent thinker torn between the medieval and Renaissance periods. Instead, Urlings offers careful readings of Salutati's major works to show a repeated use of Augustine aimed at different concerns at different times. This thoughtful, engaging, and clear study offers a convincing analysis that not only unpacks how Salutati used The City of God, but it also offers a model to study how humanists engaged with the texts available to them.

The book makes its claims across eight chapters. The Introduction (chapter one) defines key terms, provides a biographical overview of Salutati, and introduces the book's methodology. Urlings lays out that each chapter of the book will show that Salutati both used Augustine's writings in a variety of ways and consistently sought to add something new to his source material. Salutati was not, in short, simply repeating Augustine's words or ideas. In chapter two, Urlings brings forth a range of evidence to argue that, across his oeuvre, Salutati engaged extensively with Augustine's writings, especially The City of God. The groundwork for Augustinianism in Salutati's writings was laid by his connections to the Augustinian friars in Florence at Santo Spirito, especially Luigi Marsili. In addition, Salutati owned several copies of Augustine's works in his large personal library. Within that library, a manuscript now in the Vatican Library, Ott.Lat. 349, contains extensive notations – over 1000 of them in one fashion or another – by Salutati in a copy of The City of God.

After these two initial chapters the book turns to a chronological treatment of the changing influence of The City of God on Salutati's works. Each chapter contains a section to introduce the historical context for each work, as well as each work's central arguments and basic structure. Next, each chapter explores how Augustine dealt with those same topics, especially in his City of God. Each chapter then shows how Salutati adopted and used Augustine's ideas as well as how he might have engaged with them in his copy of The City of God found at Vat.Lat. Ott.Lat. 349. In chapter three, Urlings unpacks Salutati's Declamatio Lucretie dated to around 1367. In that work, Salutati rejected Augustine's claim that Lucretia could not serve as a model of behavior for Christians to emulate. Instead, Salutati argued that Lucretia's defense of her chastity through suicide carried broader meaning for the foundation of a Florentine republic. Chapter four shows how Salutati used Augustine in his De seculo et religio from 1381 or 1382. There, Salutati picked up Augustine's ideal of a life that combined contemplative and active aspects, rather than seeing them as dichotomous oppositions. Salutati did not, however, simply copy Augustine's thought: instead, he tweaked the Church Father to better fit into the Florentine chancellor's late fourteenth-century world.

This approach and structure continues across the remaining chapters of the book, each of which explores a different work by Salutati in chronological order. Chapter five looks at Salutati's De fato et fortuna, written after 1396 and prompted, at least in part, by the passing of Salutati's wife Piera. Salutati's discussion of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge with free will draws upon Augustine's City of God, Dante, as well as Salutati's own ideas. In chapter six, Urlings provides a detailed historiographical overview of studies on Salutati's De tyranno, dated to 1400. Scholars have often struggled with the seeming contradiction that a chancellor of the Florentine Republic seemingly advocated for monarchy as a preferable form of government. However, Urlings argues that Salutati almost certainly did not view republican and monarchical governments as dichotomous opponents. Once again, Urlings's thoughtful readings show that Salutati relied on Dante in his text in addition to Augustine. Chapter seven treats Salutati's final work, the De laboribus Herculis, left unfinished at the time of the chancellor's death in 1406. As with earlier texts, Urlings seeks to situate Salutati's text within its literary and historical context while rejecting macro assertions that portrayed Salutati as inconsistently a part of the medieval or Renaissance worlds. In this last work Salutati again reveals strong Augustinian influences in his allegorical readings of classical, pagan authors. Here again Salutati relied upon fourteenth-century Florentines, this time Boccaccio, as well as The City of God. A summary final chapter concludes the book.

This is an engaging study that humanist specialists and readers interested in classical reception, the history of thought, and Florentine history in general ought to read. The book's content and approach convincingly show how Salutati read and used Augustine while also providing a template for exploring how other humanists interacted with source material. Here, Augustine becomes an author who could directly or indirectly shape the ideas present in Salutati's writings or who could, at different times, have far less influence. Urlings's analysis of linear notes from a key manuscript provides direct evidence for Salutati's engagement with The City of God. Moreover, the clarity of the prose and the historiographical summaries enable the book's individual chapters to serve as good introductions to each of Salutati's major works and how those works have been understood in the historiography. The necessary choice to focus on a single text by a single author at times could leave readers to wonder how other texts and authors, provided the same treatment, might have shaped each of Salutati's works and then how Augustine might look when viewed from a broader dialogue with those other influences. But that analysis would have required a much larger book. It is left to future scholars to pick up the analytical points and methodological approach of Urlings's fine study to offer an ever more complete picture of Salutati's oeuvre.