ABSTRACT
The Renaissance valued Lorenzo Valla primarily as a philologist, the author of the spectacularly successful Elegantie lingue latine.1 The philosophical and religious writings for which he is most studied today did not even begin to approach the popularity of the Elegantie. In talking about Valla, we should never forget that some works, such as De professione religiosorum and the Encomium Sancti Thome, had virtually no circulation in the Renaissance, and that others, such as the Dialectica, owed at least part of their Renaissance currency to the reflected glory of the Elegantie. Furthermore, though Valla was one of the most original and important of the Quattrocento humanists and though much of what he wrote had profound theological relevance, we should not presume that he himself had a theology or that he made an especially original contribution to theology.
