BiblioVault - Books about 1407-1457

Correspondence

Lorenzo Valla

Harvard University Press, 2013

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 These letters, including one previously unpublished, are now edited for the first time alongside Valla's own correspondence.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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History, Rhetoric, and Proof

Carlo Ginzburg

Brandeis University Press, 1999

Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth. Ginzburg discovers a middle ground between the empiricist or positivist view of history, and the current postmodern tendency to regard any historical account as just one among an infinity of possible narratives, distinguished or measured not by the standard of truth, but by rhetorical skill. As a whole, these lectures stake out a position that both mediates and transcends warring factions in the current historiographical debate.

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In Defense of Common Sense

Lorenzo Valla's Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy

Lodi Nauta

Harvard University Press, 2009

One of the leading humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1406–1457) has been praised as a brilliant debunker of medieval scholastic philosophy. In this book Lodi Nauta seeks a more balanced assessment, presenting us with the first comprehensive analysis of the humanist’s attempt at radical reform of Aristotelian scholasticism.

This study examines Valla’s attack on major tenets of Aristotelian metaphysics, showing how Valla employed common sense and linguistic usage as his guides. It then explicates Valla’s critique of Aristotelian psychology and natural philosophy and discusses his moral and religious views, including Valla’s notorious identification of Christian beatitude with Epicurean pleasure and his daring views on the Trinity. Finally, it takes up Valla’s humanist dialectic, which seeks to transform logic into a practical tool measured by persuasiveness and effectiveness.

Nauta firmly places Valla’s arguments and ideas within the contexts of ancient and medieval philosophical traditions as well as renewed interest in ancient rhetoric in the Renaissance. He also demonstrates the relevance of Valla’s conviction that the philosophical problems of the scholastics are rooted in a misunderstanding of language. Combining philosophical exegesis and historical scholarship, this book offers a new approach to a major Renaissance thinker.

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