Lorenzo Valla

Lorenzo Valla (born 1407, Rome, Papal States [Italy]—died August 1, 1457, Rome) was an Italian humanist, philosopher, and literary critic who attacked medieval traditions and anticipated views of the Protestant reformers.

Valla was the son of a lawyer employed at the papal court. His family was from Piacenza. Until he was 24 Lorenzo spent most of his time in Rome, studying Latin grammar and rhetoric. Unable to obtain a post as papal secretary in 1430, he left Rome and spent the next five years wandering about northern Italy. He taught rhetoric at the University of Pavia, where he made public his De voluptate (On Pleasure), a dialogue about the nature of the true good. That work surprised many of its readers by its then-unfashionable defense of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who maintained that, with the attainment of virtue, a wise man may live a life of prudent pleasure, free from pain. Valla then went on to attack stoicism, the philosophy of the control of the emotions through reason and its advocacy of a simple life. Valla caused a still greater sensation by an attack on the barbarous Latin used by the celebrated 14th-century lawyer Bartolus. The law faculty at Pavia took offense, and Valla found it expedient to leave.

He lived at Milan and Genoa before settling down, in 1435, as royal secretary and historian at the court of Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples. He remained 13 years in Alfonso’s service, and it was during this time that Valla, then in his 30s, wrote most of his important books. His Declamatio (Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine), written in 1440, attacked the crude Latin of its anonymous author and from that observation argued that the document could not possibly have dated from the time of Constantine. As King Alfonso was at war with Pope Eugenius IV at this time, it was politically convenient to attack the foundation of papal claims to temporal power in Italy. The book was first printed in 1517 in Germany, the same year that Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses, criticizing papal policies. (See Researcher’s Note: The posting of the theses.)

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Valla wrote other books in his years at Alfonso’s court. In his brief dialogue De libero arbitrio (“On Free Will”), Valla attacked the stoic philosopher Boethius (480–524/525), who had attempted to reconcile man’s free will with God’s foreknowledge; and in his Dialecticae disputationes (“Dialectical Disputations”), Valla reduced Aristotle’s nine “categories” to three (substance, quality, and action, which corresponded to noun, adjective, and verb) and denounced as barbarisms a number of the technical terms of scholastic philosophy, such as “entity” and “quiddity.” Valla preferred the language of ordinary people to the jargon of professional philosophers. His “Disputations” was at once a rhetorician’s attack on logic and an attempt to reduce philosophical problems to linguistic ones. The Elegantiae linguae Latinae (“Elegances of the Latin Language”), printed in 1471, was the first textbook of Latin grammar to be written since late antiquity; it became highly popular in grammar schools all over Europe.

Valla could make even grammar polemical and shocked contemporaries by his criticisms of the prose of the famous Roman rhetorician Cicero. Similarly, his first book, written when he was 20 and now lost, had apparently argued that Quintilian, another Roman rhetorician, was a better stylist than Cicero. Valla also produced a history of the reign of Ferdinand of Aragon, Alfonso’s father. Characteristically, he showed most interest in linguistic problems, such as how to write in classical Latin about things that did not exist in Roman times—e.g., cannons and parliaments. For his offenses against the “dignity of history” he was attacked in an Invective by Bartolomeo Facio, another humanist in Alfonso’s service. Valla responded with his “Recriminations Against Facio,” written in dialogue form and recalling the debates among the court humanists, to which the king loved to listen. This work also contains Valla’s celebrated emendations to the text of the Roman historian Livy.

Meanwhile, Valla had become embroiled in another controversy, theological this time, over his refusal to believe that the Apostles’ Creed had been composed by the Twelve Apostles. As a result, he was denounced by the clergy and investigated by the Inquisition, which found him heretical on eight counts, including his defense of Epicurus and his criticisms of Aristotle’s categories. Only Alfonso’s personal intervention saved him from the stake.

Valla left Naples in 1448 when Nicholas V, successor to Eugenius IV and a supporter of humanists, appointed him papal secretary, a post in which he was confirmed by Nicholas’ successor in 1455. Valla also taught rhetoric in Rome, where he remained until his death. In his 40s, he composed his last major work, In Novum Testamentum ex diversorum utriusque linguae codicum collatione adnotationes (“Annotations on the New Testament Collected from Various Codices in Each Language”), with the encouragement and advice of two famous scholars, the cardinals Bessarion and Nicholas of Cusa. The Adnotationes, not printed until 1505, applied the methods of humanist philology to a sacred text. Predictably, Valla was attacked for his disrespect to St. Jerome, the presumed author of the Latin translation of the Bible; during the Counter-Reformation the Adnotationes were to be placed on the Index, the Roman Catholic church’s list of condemned books. Valla also translated many works from Greek into Latin. Early in his Naples days he had translated Aesop’s fables, and Pope Nicholas commissioned him to translate the historians Thucydides and Herodotus.

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Despite his heavy literary commitments, Valla never seemed to lack time or energy to engage in controversies. The Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini had criticized the “Elegances,” and Valla replied in his Antidoti in Poggium (“Antidotes to Poggio”). Both scholars are seen at their worst here, hurling at one another accusations of ignorance, of barbarism, of plagiarism, and even worse. Benedetto Morandi, a notary from Bologna, assailed Valla for his disrespect in arguing that Livy had made mistakes about Roman history; so Valla rebutted with his Confutatio in Morandum (“Refutation of Morandi”). In a little dialogue, De professione religiosorum (“On Monastic Vows”), Valla criticized the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on the grounds that what mattered was “not a vow, but devotion.”

Valla’s last public appearance was characteristic of his provocative, polemical style. In 1457 he was invited to deliver an encomium of St. Thomas Aquinas to an audience of Dominicans in the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva at Rome, to celebrate the saint’s anniversary. Valla, however, delivered an antiencomium, a critique of St. Thomas’ style and his interest in logic that advocated a return to the theology of the Fathers of the church. It is uncertain whether Valla was a priest or not. He certainly held ecclesiastical benefices. He never married but had three children by his Roman mistress.

An aggressive man, even for that age of intellectual gladiators, Valla made enemies easily. A professional heretic, he was well suited for his role as a critic of authority and orthodoxy. As one colleague observed about his notorious comparison of Cicero and Quintilian: Valla wrote simply to disturb people. There is no doubt about his success in this respect. More than 50 years later, in the age of Luther and of the great European humanist Erasmus, his barbs were still felt. Many of his criticisms of established ideas were pedantic and quibbling, but some were penetrating. He was disliked for his “impudence,” “presumption,” “temerity,” and “sacrilege.” In an age when many traditions were held sacred, Valla’s sacrilege fulfilled an important intellectual and social function.