Correspondence

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 a...