Christianity, Latinity, and Culture

This book presents, for the first time in English, two studies by Salvatore I. Camporeale (1928-2002) on the fifteenth-century thinker Lorenzo Valla. Camporeale’s work offers new perspectives on Valla, in terms of both content and method.

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The work of Lorenzo Valla (1406-57) has enjoyed renewed attention in recent years, as have new critical editions of his texts. One of the most interesting interpreters of Valla, Salvatore I. Camporeale, O.P., had a following among scholars who read Italian, but very little of his work saw the light in English before his death in 2002. This book presents two of Camporeale’s studies on Valla in English, which examine in detail two of Valla’s works: his treatise on the Donation of Constantine (undoubtedly the work for which Valla is best known) and his Encomium of Saint Thomas Aquinas, delivered publicly in the last year of Valla’s life and, in Camporeale’s reading, summing up Valla’s multi-faceted thought.