The textual criticism of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407-1457) provided methods and inspiration for the reappraisal of Europe's historical and religious scholarship during the Renaissance.

Born in Rome and educated there before adopting, at Florence and elsewhere, the itinerant life common among contemporary scholars, Lorenzo Valla mastered ancient Greek and Ciceronian Latin. Appointed to a chair of rhetoric at the University of Pavia in 1431, he denounced the law faculty's jurisprudence because of its medieval foundations, and he became a champion of classical scholarship based on grammar and philology.

The dispute forced Valla from Pavia in 1433, but his reputation as a man of letters and as a bold, irascible polemicist commended him to rulers who sought the adornment of scholar-publicists for their courts. His first settled connection (1435-1448) was in Naples with King Alfonso V of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples, whose campaign to wrest southern Italy from...