Background
Valla Lorenzo was born in 1406, in Rome, Italy. His father, Luca delle Vallea, was being an advocate.
(Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was a leading humanist scholar ...)
Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was a leading humanist scholar and controversial writer of the fifteenth century. Born in Rome he spent part of his early life in other cities in Italy teaching rhetoric. After serving as secretary to the king of Naples, Alfonso V of Aragon, from 1435 to 1448, he eventually returned to his native city where he became apostolic secretary two years before his death. Although his works, all written in Latin, treat a number of linguistic, historical or philosophical issues, his most polemical treatises are those dealing with religious questions. In The Profession of the Religious and The Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine, both dating from around 1440, he advocates an inner kind of spirituality that can be achieved even by the laity and he criticizes the ecclesiastical institutions for their role in exploiting the legend according to which the emperor had allegedly conferred political power on the Pope. These treatises, and especially the well-known Donation, aroused considerable interest among the Protestant reformers; they are, moreover, fascinating texts for the modern reader too. Structured as a dialogue and an oration, respectively, they illustrate the various discursive strategies devised by the author as effective means of persuasion.
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(Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) was the leading philologist of ...)
Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) was the leading philologist of the first half of the fifteenth century, as well as a philosopher, theologian, and translator. His extant Latin letters are fewer than those of many of his contemporaries, since he never collected or consciously preserved them. For that reason they afford a direct and unguarded window into the working life of the most passionate, difficult, and interesting of the Italian humanists. They show him as a teacher and secretary, but above all as a writer who continually worked and reworked his major contributions to dialectic and philology, notably his masterpiece on the Elegances of the Latin Language, a central text of the Renaissance. More plentiful are the letters of others to him, which place him at the center of a humanist network that extended from Venice to Naples. They also shed light on the furious polemics in which he involved himself. These letters, including one previously unpublished, are now edited for the first time alongside Valla's own correspondence. The translation is the first into any modern language.
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( Lorenzo Valla (14071457) ranks among the greatest scho...)
Lorenzo Valla (14071457) ranks among the greatest scholars and thinkers of the Renaissance. He secured lasting fame for his brilliant critical skills, most famously in his exposure of the Donation of Constantine, the forged document upon which the papacy based claims to political power. Lesser known in the English-speaking world is Vallas work in the philosophy of language?the basis of his reputation as the greatest philosopher of the humanist movement. Dialectical Disputations, translated here for the first time into any modern language, is his principal contribution to the philosophy of language and logic. With this savage attack on the scholastic tradition of Aristotelian logic, Valla aimed to supersede it with a new logic based on the actual historical usage of classical Latin and on a commonsense approach to semantics and argument. Valla provides a logic that could be used by lawyers, preachers, statesmen, and others who needed to succeed in public debate?one that was stylistically correct and rhetorically elegant, and thus could dispense with the technical language of the scholastics, a tribe of Peripatetics, perverters of natural meanings. Vallas reformed dialectic became a milestone in the development of humanist logic and contains startling anticipations of modern theories of semantics and language. Volume 2 contains Books IIIII, in which Valla refutes Aristotles logical works on propositions, topics, and the syllogistic.
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educator humanist priest rhetorician
Valla Lorenzo was born in 1406, in Rome, Italy. His father, Luca delle Vallea, was being an advocate.
In 1431, he entered the priesthood, and after trying in vain to secure a position as apostolic secretary, he went to Piacenza, whence he proceeded to Pavia, where he obtained a professorship of eloquence. His tenure at Pavia was made unpleasant by his attack on the Latin style of the great jurist Bartolus de Saxoferrato. Valla wandered from one university to another, accepting short engagements and lecturing in many cities.
From Naples, Valla continued his philological work. He showed that the supposed letter of Christ to Abgarus was a forgery, and by throwing doubt upon the authenticity of other spurious documents, and by questioning the utility of monastic life, he aroused the anger of some of the faithful. He was compelled to appear before a tribunal composed of his enemies, and he only escaped by the special intervention of Alfonso. He was not, however, silenced; he ridiculed the Latin of the Vulgate and accused St Augustine of heresy. In 1444 he visited Rome, but in this city also his enemies were numerous and powerful, and he only saved his life by fleeing in disguise to Barcelona, whence he returned to Naples. But a better fortune attended him after the death of Eugene IV in February 1447. Again he journeyed to Rome, where he was welcomed by the new pope, Nicholas V, who made him an apostolic secretary. This entrance of Valla into the Roman Curia has been called "the triumph of humanism over orthodoxy and tradition. "
On 7 March, the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas the studium generale of the Dominican Order at Rome, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum, invited Valla to deliver the annual encomium of the "angelic doctor, " pressing him not only to praise but also to voice humanist criticism of scholastic thomism.
Valla also enjoyed the favour of Pope Calixtus III.
Valla is best known for his textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.
(Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) was the leading philologist of ...)
(Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) was a leading humanist scholar ...)
( Lorenzo Valla (14071457) ranks among the greatest scho...)
In 1431 he became a priest, and after trying vainly to secure a position as apostolic secretary in Rome he went to Piacenza, whence he proceeded to Pavia, where he obtained a professorship of eloquence.
He showed that the supposed letter of Christ to Abgarus was a forgery, and by throwing doubt upon the authenticity of other spurious documents, and by questioning the utility of monastic life, he aroused the anger of the faithful.
He appears, however, as a vain, jealous and quarrelsome man, but he combined the qualities of an elegant humanist, an acute critic and a venomous writer, who bad committed himself to a violent polemic against the temporal power of Rome.
The family was from Piacenza. His father was a lawyer who worked at the papal court.
