If modern historians have difficulty in sharing the excitement which Renaissance humanists felt about the hunt for lost works of classical literature they should be somewhat more impressed by the humanists' invention of the distinctively modern art of textual criticism. Medieval writers sometimes showed awareness that errors had crept into the classical, patristic, and even biblical texts that they used. In general, however, medieval thinkers were remarkably naive about the accuracy and authenticity of the texts they used. The Middle Ages were a forger's paradise, and both literary texts and legal documents were frequently manufactured to order if they seemed necessary but did not exist. In addition, many texts which were genuinely ancient were attributed to the wrong author. Even Aristotle, the most intensely studied secular author, acquired an annex of pseudo-Aristotelian works, many of which ought to have been (but were not) easily rejected simply on the basis of their incompatibility with opinions expressed in his many genuine works. Among Latin authors, both the letters of the younger Pliny and the Natural History of the elder Pliny were known throughout the Middle Ages but were thought to be the work of a single author. The rather simple feat of distinguishing uncle from nephew (for the nephew in one letter even describes the dramatic death of his uncle during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius) was not achieved until one of the early humanists pointed out the obvious.

Humanists from Petrarch onward became aware that many classical texts contained omissions, interpolations, and textual errors as a result of simple scribal mistakes that had accumulated through centuries of recopying. Thus humanists sought not only to find lost works but also to detect and remedy textual errors, either through comparison of multiple manuscripts or through conjecture based on their sense of the author's style or the general context. Yet even at its best, the early humanistic work of criticizing and emending ancient texts was haphazard.

A decisive step toward sounder critical methods was the work of Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), a Roman humanist whose most enduring connections were with the papal curia. He studied at Mantua in the famous school of Vittorino da Feltre, taught rhetoric for a time at the University of Pavia, met the chief Florentine humanists of the 1420s' and spent many years in the service of the king of Naples before finally returning to Rome as a secretary in the papal chancery. Most recent scholars agree that in terms of sheer intellectual power and originality, Valla was the ablest of all the Renaissance humanists. He had a keen intellect and a driving ambition to excel at scholarship. He was one of the few humanists of his generation who had a marked interest in philosophical issues, and in every field that he touched, he tended to take unconventional, even extreme, positions.

But most relevant here is that as a humanist rhetorician and grammarian, Valla hit upon the second of the two truly new ideas of Renaissance thought (the first being Petrarch's discovery of historical discontinuity). This idea, which no ancient or medieval thinker had clearly seen, was that human language, like everything else outside of the material world, is a cultural artifact, so that language undergoes historical development and changes with the passage of time. In terms of his own main field of interest, grammar, this meant that the attempt of all previous humanists to write better Latin lacked a secure foundation because they failed to take linguistic development into account. The effort to write an eclectic 'classical' style, which was typical of earlier humanists, really produced no style at all because modern authors uncritically chose grammatical usage and vocabulary from ancient authors who may have lived six or seven centuries apart. Valla insisted that anyone who wants to write good Latin must define some one period, preferably the late republic and the early empire, and use only the words and grammatical practices found in authors of that period. Here he was tacitly accusing virtually all his predecessors and contemporaries of stylistic incompetence. To make matters worse, he not only dared to suggest that the revered Cicero was not a sure guide on matters of style and that the recently rediscovered rhetorician Quintilian was superior, but he also was sharp enough to detect stylistic flaws in the writings of respected contemporaries, and rude enough to make his opinions publicly known, so that he spent his life involved in bitter personal feuds.

Valla's principle of linguistic change was the underlying basis of modern linguistics. It found its most popular expression in his Elegances of the Latin Language (c. 1440). This is a guide to classical style, usage, and grammar, based inductively on close study of the leading authors of the Latin Golden Age. One of the longest and most valuable parts presents a careful, comparative study of the precise meanings of individual Latin words, a sort of fifteenth-century precursor to Fowler's Modern English Usage, all the more valuable in an age when, professionally speaking, humanists lived and died by their ability to write superior Latin. When printing came to Italy a decade after his death, the Elegances was printed early and often. It became the humanist's best guide to a good Latin style; and by 1536, the death of Erasmus, who admired it greatly, fifty-nine editions of this long and costly text had been printed.

The fruitfulness of Valla's critical mentality is well represented by his Emendationes Livianae, a set of notes showing that some of the facts recorded by Livy could not possibly be true, and that even the greatest historians must be subjected to critical analysis. What this work on Livy demonstrates is that Valla's brilliant insight into philological criticism was part of a broader historical criticism leading to drastic re-evaluation of historical documents. This led him to make attacks on the conventional legal scholarship of his day and to challenge the credibility of many popularly accepted documents, such as the supposed correspondence between the Apostle Paul and the Roman philosopher Seneca.

The most famous exercise of his critical method was a tract he wrote on behalf of his employer King Alfonso of Naples when the king was at war with the pope. His Declamation on the Forged Donation of Constantine (c. 1440) attacked the authenticity of a document that formed an important part of the medieval popes' claim to possess political (rather than only religious) authority over all of Western Europe. The Donation purports to be a grant of political authority by the first Christian emperor, Constantine, to Pope Sylvester I. It is a blatant forgery made in the eighth century (four centuries after Constantine). But it had been included in the collections of canon law and had been cited by papal apologists during their conflicts with the medieval German emperors. A few critics had cautiously wondered about its authenticity. But Valla did not merely wonder. He subjected the document to intensive critical examination, applying general principles of both historical and linguistic criticism, two ways of thinking little practised in the Middle Ages. First Valla advanced purely theoretical objections. Such a grant would never have been made by a competent emperor like Constantine, and even if it had been offered, a saintly pope like Sylvester would have refused it, for he had no worldly ambition. This rhetorical thrust at the political ambitions of the current pope could have been made by any medieval defender of royal power. Valla's second line of argument was more innovative, involving a basic principle of historical criticism. This was the demand for independent corroboration. If Constantine really did transfer control over the Western provinces, where are the other evidences of Sylvester's rule? Where are the laws, charters, and other documents issued in his name, and the lists of officials he appointed? Where are the coins struck bearing his image? Which contemporary or later chroniclers recorded the events of Sylvester's reign? Turning to the text itself, he subjected it to close verbal analysis. For example, 'Constantine' speaks of his new capital of 'Constantinople', but that name was never used in his time. Again, the alleged emperor speaks of the optimates as if they were Roman nobles, but any student of Roman history should know that they were an aristocratic political faction during the civil wars of the late republic, centuries earlier. Most telling of all, however, is Valia's devastating application of philological science: the language used in the document is not the Latin used in genuine documents of the fourth-century imperial chancery but shows characteristics of a much later phase in the degeneration of classical Latin. For example, why did the author use the medieval word banna for flag, when any Roman would have written the correct word, vexillum? Leaving aside the question why Constantine, a layman, would presume to grant a bishop authority to ordain priests, why in the document does he use the medieval term clericare for ordain? Valla also pointed out grossly unclassical grammatical forms. In short, the document must be a forgery. Both historically and linguistically, it contains gross anachronisms. The Middle Ages had absolutely no sensitivity to anachronism, as art historians and literary historians have repeatedly noted, because it was quite innocent of the concept of historical discontinuity and periodization that Petrarch had invented.

Valla's critical attack was devastating, though in fact the papacy did not quit citing the Donation in defence of its political claims for several centuries. In 1519, the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten published Valla's treatise as Evangelical propaganda against the popes. But Valla did not conceive his tract as an attack on the papacy at all, only as an attack on the political claims that the current pope was making against the king of Naples.

While his development of the concept of linguistic change and the invention of philological and historical criticism were his greatest achievements, Valla was also one of the best Hellenists of his generation. He produced Latin translations of Homer's Iliad, Herodotus, and Thucydides. His most historically significant application of Greek, however, was his Annotations on the New Testament. He had observed serious stylistic defects in the currently used Latin Bible, the Vulgate, and sought to remedy these defects by referring to the Greek original. He insisted that serious New Testament scholarship must refer to the Greek text, and that difficult passages in the Vulgate could be clarified by consulting the Greek. What he eventually produced was a set of notes on specific passages where unclear phrases or apparent errors could be remedied by looking at the Greek. This pioneering effort attracted little attention until 1504, when the greatest of the northern humanists, Erasmus, found a manuscript of Valla's Annotations in a monastery near Louvain. He published it the following year, an important step in the development of his own biblical scholarship.

The truly fruitful part of Valla's work, his creation of a scholarly method of philological and historical criticism, was little understood by his contemporaries. The sceptical, critical approach to documents that he conceived was too disruptive of tradition, too contrary to mental habits inherited from the Middle Ages, to be widely accepted. Of his great philological achievements, only his Elegances, a practical guide for humanists who wished to develop a good Latin style, was widely circulated before the sixteenth century.

By the time of Valla's death in 1457, humanistic studies were the height of fashion in Italian courts and cities. The large number of humanists contending for choice appointments such as positions in the chanceries of the papacy and the various cities and courts led to bitter feuds among the humanists, who built their reputations in part by pulling down the reputations of their rivals. Valla himself had played this game skilfully, but his immense originality, so admired by modern historians of humanism, was not so evident to his contemporaries.

© 2002 Mikael Hörnqvist

Renässanshumanismen