A fitting homage to the late Dominican scholar Salvatore Camporeale, this book presents for the first time an English translation of two of Camporeale's monographs on the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla. In the introduction, Celenza provides an admirably concise evaluation of Valla's work and Camporeale's contribution to the field. The volume ends with Baker's translation of Valla's Encomium to St Thomas which, together with Valla's Donation to Constantine, forms the basis of Camporeale's studies. This book is an invaluable contribution to the field of Renaissance studies, which is often quasi-exclusively dominated, at least in the English-speaking world, by Kristeller's work and approach. As Celenza reminds us, Camporeale's scholarship was indebted to the late Eugenio Garin, Italy's leading Renaissance scholar. Like Garin, Camporeale laid a strong emphasis on the historical and philological dimension of Valla's method, which Valla used to question the political, religious and theological ideology of his time. Camporeale's original contribution lies in demonstrating that Valla aimed to develop a ‘humanist theology’ as an ‘alternative to the medieval and scholastic ecclesiology of the “Constantinian Church”, which was still dominant in the fifteenth century'. In the first study, Valla's Donation of Constantine is presented as a critique of fourth-century Christianity: Constantine's crowning as the first Christian emperor signified the end of authentic evangelism and the start of what Valla saw as the fundamentally wrong union between imperial power (imperium) and the Gospel's spiritual message (evangelium). In the second study, Valla's Encomium to St Thomas Aquinas is shown to be a polemic against scholasticism and a defence of patristic theology. According to Camporeale, Valla rejected the conflation of pagan philosophy and Christian theology established by Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, and advocated a return to the evangelism of the early Church Fathers, who used language rather than philosophy to deliver God's message. Thanks to his impeccable scholarship, which included an incomparable knowledge of canon law and theology, Camporeale was able to identify the coherence in Valla's approach. According to him, Valla considered that ‘tradition cannot guarantee theological orthodoxy or canonical legitimacy’ and that truth is only secured when, through a philologico-historical analysis of texts, one can show perfect agreement between the words and the things that they signify. It was rhetoric, not philosophy, which should serve as the handmaid to theology. This does not mean, however, that Valla's thought was aphilosophical, or anti-philosophical, as many scholars still think today. Camporeale is at pains to underline that Valla's defence of a new language led to a renewed knowledge of reality (that is, philosophy), which was closer to truth than scholastic terminology. Thus Camporeale reiterates, like Garin, the fundamentally metaphysical dimension of Valla's humanism, whose use of philology and history served a political, religious and philosophical agenda. Baker's elegant translation provides a clear, faithful version of Camporeale's often complex and intricate style. As such, the present volume will also prove an invaluable tool for scholars and students who are not fully versed in Italian or are not familiar with contemporary Italian scholarship.