  Chiral lagrangians as effective field theories of QCD are most suitable for
the study of nucleons in a hot pion gas because they contain pions and also
baryons as solitons of the same action. The semiclassical treatment of the
soliton solutions must be augmented by pionic fluctuations which requires
renormalisation to 1-loop, and finite temperatures do not introduce new
ultraviolet divergencies and may easily be considered. Alternatively, a
renormalisation scheme based on the renormalisation group equation at finite
temperature comprises and extends the rigorous results of chiral perturbation
theory and renders the low energy constants temperature-dependent which allows
the construction of temperature-dependent solitons below the critical
temperature. The temperature-dependence of the baryon energy and the
pion-nucleon coupling is studied. There is no simple scaling law for the
temperature-dependence of these quantities.
