Valla on Biblical Scholarship: Metadiscourse at the Court of Nicholas V

Abstract

Lorenzo Valla’s Annotationes to the New Testament have been the object ofstudy both as part of the history of Biblical scholarship and in the context ofValla’s own intellectual development. The work was, however, embedded in theintellectual context of the Vatican court in the 1450s, where several humanistswere engaged in Biblical scholarship. A comparison of Valla’s approach to theBible with that of Cardinal Bessarion, George of Trebizond, and GiannozzoManetti shows that these authors shared a set of principles which they debatedamong themselves and applied each in their own way.