Lorenzo Valla

Life and Career

Lorenzo Valla (c. 1407–1457) was an Italian humanist scholar, priest, and one of the most influential philologists of the early Renaissance. Born in Rome, he was educated in the studia humanitatis, studying grammar, rhetoric, and classical literature, most likely under prominent Roman humanists such as Leonardo Bruni’s circle and others active in the papal city. From an early stage, Valla showed exceptional talent in Latin style and a combative temperament that would shape his scholarly and public life.

Valla’s career took him across the Italian peninsula. After failing to secure a position in the papal Curia in the 1420s, he taught rhetoric and eloquence in various cities, including Pavia, where he held a chair in rhetoric, and later Milan and Naples. His outspoken criticisms of established authorities—grammarians, jurists, and even theologians—created conflicts that repeatedly endangered his positions. In Naples he entered the service of Alfonso V of Aragon, king of Naples, as a royal secretary. This courtly environment provided protection and resources for several of his major works.

Around the mid-1440s Valla’s fortunes changed when he returned to Rome. Under Pope Nicholas V, a humanist pope interested in the revival of classical learning, Valla became an apostolic secretary and later canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. This appointment placed him at the center of Roman intellectual life, despite his earlier critiques of aspects of papal authority. He remained in Rome until his death on 1 August 1457.

Philology, Rhetoric, and Method

Valla’s enduring significance lies in his development of critical philology—the close analysis of language, grammar, and style as tools for historical and philosophical inquiry. He believed that Latin, when studied in its classical purity, could reveal both the errors of recent tradition and the authentic thought of ancient authors.

In Elegantiae linguae Latinae (“Elegances of the Latin Language”), completed in the 1440s, Valla offered a systematic account of classical Latin usage, criticizing the medieval Latin of scholastic theology and legal discourse as barbarous and corrupt. The work is at once a grammar, a stylistic guide, and a manifesto for Renaissance humanism, urging scholars to imitate authors such as Cicero, Quintilian, and Livy rather than medieval authorities. The Elegantiae became a widely read textbook and helped standardize humanist Latin across Europe.

Valla’s approach to texts was guided by two key principles:

1. Historical-linguistic sensitivity: Words and idioms change over time; therefore, the language of a document must fit its supposed date and author.
2. Rhetorical and semantic clarity: Philosophical and theological arguments should be expressed in ordinary, historically appropriate language, rather than in what he saw as the obscurity of scholastic technical terms.

These principles shaped his celebrated work De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (“Declamation on the Falsely Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine”), composed c. 1440. Applying linguistic and historical criteria, Valla argued that the Donation of Constantine—a document claiming that Emperor Constantine granted temporal authority over the Western Roman Empire to the pope—was a medieval forgery. He pointed to anachronistic vocabulary, references to institutions that did not yet exist, and stylistic features inconsistent with fourth-century Latin.

Valla framed his critique as a rhetorical “declamation,” but the underlying method was rigorous: he treated the document as a philological problem, to be solved by comparing it to securely dated sources. Later Protestant reformers, including Martin Luther and Ulrich von Hutten, would praise and publicize Valla’s analysis, seeing it as evidence against papal temporal power, even though Valla himself remained within the Roman Church.

Critique of Authority and Legacy

Beyond language and textual authenticity, Valla extended his critical method to ethics, logic, and theology. In De voluptate (revised as De vero falsoque bono, “On True and False Good”), he offered a controversial ethical theory that gave a central place to pleasure (voluptas). Drawing on Epicurean and Stoic traditions while affirming Christian revelation, Valla argued that human happiness involves a form of pleasure compatible with piety and charity. Critics accused him of importing pagan hedonism into Christian thought, while supporters emphasized his attempt to reconnect ethical discourse with ordinary human experience, rather than with abstract scholastic categories.

In his Dialecticae disputationes (“Dialectical Disputations”), Valla attacked the scholastic logic of Aristotle’s medieval commentators. He claimed that scholastic dialectic had drifted away from the practical, persuasive aims of rhetoric and from the living usage of language. For Valla, logic should not be an autonomous, highly technical discipline; it should be subordinate to rhetoric and grounded in common linguistic practice. Proponents of his approach see in this a precursor to later humanist and even some modern linguistic philosophies that emphasize ordinary language. Critics argue that his polemics sometimes oversimplified the achievements of scholastic logic and neglected its formal rigor.

Valla also applied philological scrutiny to the Latin Vulgate Bible and to patristic texts. While serving in the papal Curia, he produced annotations on the New Testament, comparing the Vulgate with the Greek text and proposing corrections in light of grammar and context. Although some churchmen saw this as a threat to established authority, others regarded it as a useful tool for clarifying Scripture. His work anticipated the later, more extensive New Testament philology of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who admired Valla and helped disseminate his writings.

Valla’s legacy is multi-faceted:

• In humanism, he stands as a central figure in the shift from medieval scholastic discourse to the classical, historically conscious Latin of the Renaissance.
• In textual criticism, his analysis of the Donation of Constantine became a paradigmatic case of exposing forgery through philological means.
• In theology and biblical studies, he contributed to the tradition of critical engagement with sacred texts within the Church, influencing later Catholic and Protestant scholarship.
• In intellectual culture, his bold challenges to linguistic, legal, and theological authorities exemplify the broader Renaissance impulse to return ad fontes—“to the sources”—and to question inherited traditions.

Modern scholars debate the extent to which Valla should be viewed as primarily a stylist and grammarian or as a more systemic philosopher. Some emphasize his role in creating the methodological foundations for historical and textual criticism; others stress his rhetorical temperament and polemical aims. In either case, his work helped redefine what it meant to do scholarship in the fifteenth century, making language and historical context central tools for understanding and revising the intellectual heritage of the Latin West.