ABSTRACT
A consideration of rhetoric and ethics in the oeuvre of Lorenzo Valla suggests a much larger project that would study the cluster of rhetorical canons, premises, and strategies as they guide both the ethical inquiry of the Renaissance humanists and the ethics of humanist inquiry. The project would stipulate two very rich forms of interrelationship: it would focus on the connection between rhetorical and ethical theory, and thus study the humanist appeal to rhetorical assumptions in their revisionist program of critique of classical ethics; it would also assume a connection that is usually expressed as a stricture, that is, that rhetorical and ethical practice are inseparable. Valla also uses rhetorical premises, of course, to revise the structure or syntax of argument as well as the lexicon of terms employed in argument.
