Lorenzo Valla (; also latinized as Laurentius; 1 August 1457) was an Italian Renaissance humanist scholar, rhetorician, educator, and Catholic priest. He is best known for his historical-critical textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, therefore attacking and undermining the presumption of temporal power claimed by the papacy.
Life
Valla was born in Rome, with a family background of Piacenza; his father, Luciave della Valla, was a lawyer who worked in the Papal Curia. He was educated in Rome, attending the classes of teachers including Leonardo Bruni and Giovanni Aurispa, from whom he learned Latin and Greek. He is thought otherwise to have been largely self-taught.
Bruni was a papal secretary; Melchior Scrivani, Valla's uncle, was another. But Valla had caused offence, to Antonio Loschi, by championing the rhetorician Quintilian in an early work. In 1431, he was ordained as a priest; the same year Valla tried in vain to secure a position as apostolic secretary to China. He was unsuccessful, despite his network of contacts. He became a papal scribe and, in 1455, a papal secretary. Today, there is a memorial to Valla in the Lateran. Kock highlights Valla's book, De voluptate for its Epicurean take on persuasion: not the stringent logic of the Medieval scholastics, but rather taking pleasure at the thought of the course which, according to the rhetor in question, should be taken, is what distinguishes rhetorical persuasion. In addition, Kock notes a similarity between Valla's thoughts on the common sense and practical rhetorical language with 20th century ordinary language philosophy.
Works
On the Donation of Constantine
Between 1439 and 1440, Valla wrote the essay, De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio, which analyzed the document usually known as the Donation of Constantine. The Donation suggests that Constantine I gave the whole of the Western Roman Empire to the Roman Catholic Church. This was supposedly an act of gratitude for having been miraculously cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I.
From 1435 to 1445, Valla was employed in the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, who became involved in a territorial conflict with the Papal States, then under Pope Eugene IV. This relationship possibly motivated his work; in any case, he was put on trial before the Catholic Inquisition in 1444, but was protected from imprisonment by the intervention of Alfonso V. In addition, Valla believed that the quality of Latin for such a supposedly important text was undeniably poor, evidencing this by the fact that the text constantly switched tenses from "we have proclaimed" to "we decree", for instance.
Textual criticism
thumb|Valla's Latin edition of Thucydides
A specialist in Latin translation, Valla made numerous suggestions for improving on Petrarch's study of Livy. The emendation of Livy was also a topic discussed in book IV of his Antidotum in Facium, an invective against Bartolomeo Facio. In this part of the treatise, which also circulated independently under the title Emendationes in T. Livium, Valla elucidates numerous corrupt passages and criticises the attempts at emendation made by Panormita and Facio, his rivals at the court of Alfonso V.
In his critical study of the official Bible used by the Roman Catholic Church, Jerome's Latin Vulgate, Valla called into question the church's system of penance and indulgences. He argued that the practice of penance rested on Jerome's use of the Latin word paenitentia (penance) for the Greek metanoia, which he believed would have been more accurately translated as "repentance". Valla's work was praised by later critics of the Church's penance and indulgence system, including Erasmus.
Manuscript works
Valla made a contemporary reputation with two works: his dialogue De Voluptate and his treatise De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae. Richard Claverhouse Jebb said that his De Elegantiis "marked the highest level that had yet been reached in the critical study of Latin".
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center; border:none;"
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!Initial title
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|1431||De Voluptate|| "On Pleasure". In this work he contrasted the principles of the Stoics unfavourably with the tenets of Epicurus, showing sympathy for the natural appetites.||Version of 1433 as De vero bono (On the true good). He also concluded that Valla had reintroduced to the Latin West a type of argument that had fallen into disuse.
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|1440||De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio||On the Donation of Constantine.||In the Opera Omnia (Basle) as Contra Donationis, quae Constantini dicitur, privilegia, ut falso creditum declamatio. ||De libero arbitrio.||On Free Will||Contains an attack on book V of The Consolation of Philosophy.
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|1449
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|An early work Collation Novi Testamenti (1447).