Humanist Scholarship in Practice: Philology and the Florentine Chancery

Humanist philology treated texts historically, attending to linguistic change, scribal error, and the material transmission of manuscripts across centuries, and its greatest practitioner was Lorenzo Valla. His Elegantiae Linguae Latinae (1449) systematically analyzed classical Latin usage, correcting medieval corruptions and establishing a normative classical grammar that would guide humanist Latin for generations. Valla's most famous single achievement was exposing the Donation of Constantine — the supposed imperial grant that underwrote papal temporal claims — as a forgery, in his De Falso Credita et Ementita Constantini Donatione (c. 1440), using anachronistic vocabulary and institutions as linguistic evidence of the document's medieval origin. His dialectical treatise Repastinatio Dialecticae et Philosophiae extended the same critical spirit to scholastic logic itself, which he attacked for corrupting natural language and reasoning with artificial Latin terminology.