Lorenzo Valla

Born around 1407, Valla trained as a humanist scholar and rhetorician in Renaissance Italy, then took holy orders. His historical-critical method — reading texts the way a lawyer reads contracts — led him to dismantle the Donation of Constantine, the document that had anchored papal claims to temporal power across Europe. By analyzing the Latin, the legal concepts, and the anachronisms, he demonstrated it was a medieval forgery, not a fourth-century grant. The work attacked the institutional foundation of the papacy's political authority and made him a forerunner of reformist critique. He died…