Lorenzo Valla

Lorenzo Valla (Rome, 1406 or 1407 – Rome, 1 August 1457) was an Italian humanist who worked as a rhetorician, teacher and philosopher, and who is often regarded as a pioneer of modern historical and philological criticism. He lived during the Renaissance, when humanists sought to recover ancient texts and clear them of the errors that had accumulated over the Middle Ages. His name is tied above all to a demonstration that caused a stir in his own time: the document known as the Donation of Constantine, which the papacy used to claim large territories in the West, was a forgery.

His family came from Piacenza, and his father, Luca della Valla, was a lawyer. Valla studied Latin with Leonardo Bruni and Greek with Giovanni Aurispa, and he is thought to have been largely self-taught in other areas. He was ordained a priest in 1431, and that same year he unsuccessfully sought a post as apostolic secretary. He then taught eloquence at the University of Pavia, but his attack on the Latin style of the jurist Bartolus of Saxoferrato made him enemies and forced him to leave. After that he moved from one university to another. Between 1435 and 1445 he served at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon in Naples, where he wrote much of his philological work. Around 1447 Pope Nicholas V invited him to Rome to translate Greek texts into Latin, and he ended his days there as a papal scribe and, in 1455, papal secretary.

His best-known work is the treatise on the Donation of Constantine, written around 1439–1440. Valla argued that the document's language belonged to the eighth century rather than the fourth, pointed to anachronisms such as the word "satrap", and held that Constantine could not legally have granted such powers. In biblical scholarship he worked from the Greek of the New Testament and questioned the Vulgate's rendering of the Greek metanoia as paenitentia, which he thought should mean "repentance" rather than "penance", a point that undermined the church's system of penance and indulgences. His Elegantiae of the Latin language offered a rigorous grammar and a model of classical Latin. In philosophy, his early dialogue De voluptate showed an Epicurean leaning that he later revised in De vero bono, and his Dialectical Disputations aimed to clarify and rationalise Aristotelian logic as taught in the scholastic tradition.

Valla was a combative polemicist, and he was once put on trial for heresy after a dispute over the Apostles' Creed. His influence was considerable. Erasmus regarded him as an indispensable guide to Latin grammar, Martin Luther held him in high esteem, and Robert Bellarmine called him "Luther's precursor". His methods of textual criticism anticipated much later philological work.