Anyone over the past few decades investigating the Italian Renaissance and, in particular, the humanists, has on occasion reckoned with Lorenzo Valla. Such investigations would have inevitably led to the work of Salvatore Camporeale, who spent much of his scholarly life analyzing Valla’s work. All who knew Camporeale and his studies understood that his scholarship on Valla was nothing short of a labor of love. In the years since the death of Camporeale in 2002, several reviews of his work have appeared that honor and analyze his contribution to Italian Renaissance historiography, and the present volume extends both. It presents two of Camporeale’s seminal studies on Valla in English translation by Patrick Baker with an introductory essay by Christopher Celenza on Camporeale’s life and works. Also included as an appendix is the reprint of S. Cartei’s critical text of Valla’s Encomion Sancti Thome Aquinatis (2008), with a facing English translation. The two studies, “Lorenzo Valla and the De falso credita Donatione: Rhetoric, Freedom, and Ecclesiology in the Fifteenth Century” and “Lorenzo Valla between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Encomium of St. Thomas 1457,” well reveal Camporeale’s historical thought and methods. In them Camporeale illuminates the Italian Renaissance through an extended explication d’text of Valla’s Donatione and Encomion.

Nonnative readers of Italian will be especially grateful for the appearance of this translation of Camporeale’s two works. Perhaps it cannot be said of Camporeale’s Italian prose, as was said of Kant’s German, that all the verbs are in volume 2, but in reading Camporeale one could at times start to think they might be. As Baker more kindly notes, Camporeale’s “Latinate and at times highly technical style can be difficult to navigate” (xiii). As the translator observes, the opacity often derives from Camporeale’s expectation that his readers will have the same familiarity with the sources being discussed as does Camporeale himself. This translation is to be commended for having rendered the text into very readable and lucid prose. The translation also employs the recent translation of Valla’s Donation by G. W. Bowersock (2007), adapting it where necessary to clarify Camporeale’s understanding of the source.

Camporeale’s analysis of Valla’s Encomium of St. Thomas elucidates a moment in the historiography of Thomistic tradition between the mid-fourteenth and the end of the fifteenth century. It examines Valla’s alienation from, or even hostility toward, Scholastic theology. Valla, having been invited to deliver this encomium to the Dominicans at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in 1457, took the occasion to disparage modern theology against the foil of patristic theology. In keeping with his damatio philosophiae and its transgression into theology, Valla employs a musical metaphor that assigns all the dulcet-toned instruments to the fathers, leaving Thomas and John Damascene stuck playing the cymbals.

Camporeale’s analysis of Valla’s exposé of the Donation does not attempt to explain why this work failed to resonate in Valla’s own day. The pontificate of Eugenius IV showed little if any reaction to Valla’s work. The Donation may have carried great weight toward the end of the eighth century, when it was forged, but by Valla’s day widespread suspicions about the document amounted to little more than an “oh, well” in the face of papal realpolitik. Although Valla’s exposé is concerned with undermining the papacy’s claim to legitimate exercise of imperium, that Valla went about this, as Camporeale makes clear, by arguing for the “irreconcilable relationship between imperium and evangelium” (47) must have made the document as unpalatable to secular princes as to religious ones. No secular prince, including Valla’s own, would have happily embraced the view that his actions were irreconcilable with the Gospel. Valla’s own position entails no little ambiguity as well: he was employed by and supported a prince whose activity he regarded as inimical to the Gospel. What’s more, he soon accepted employment from Pope Nicholas V, whose pontificate rested, presumably, on this “irreconcilable relationship.” Camporeale’s studies plumb deeply Valla’s complicated situation and expectations.