The Italian Renaissance and the Classics: Lorenzo Valla's Image of Aristotle

Prof Celenza's presentation, part of the Department's Speakers' Series,  introduces the sizable body of Latin literature produced in Italy in the fifteenth century as a lost monument of western philosophical history.   During it, he will focus on one important Italian thinker: Lorenzo Valla.  This Renaissance humanist has been seen as emblematic of certain of Italian humanism's most important intellectual trends.  How innovative was Valla?  Did his innovative theory connect practically with early modern Europe's concerns? This talk will suggest answers to those questions by examining Valla's relationship to one of the fountainheads of western thought, Aristotle

Christopher Celenza, a professor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins, is an historian and Latinist who works on European intellectual history.  He has PhDs in History from Duke and in Classics and Neo-Latin Literature from the University of Hamburg.   More specifically, his interests include the Latin literature and philosophy of the Italian Renaissance, late medieval intellectual history, the history of philosophy, the history of books and reading practices, and Latin paleography.  In addition to numerous articles, he has published:

The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) xx + 210 pp.  This book won the Renaissance Society of America's 2005 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize and was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2006.  Paperback ed., 2006.

Piety and Pythagoras in Renaissance Florence: The Symbolum Nesianum, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 101 (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2001) x + 238 pp.

Renaissance Humanism and the Papal Curia: Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger's De curiae commodis, Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, 31 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) xiv + 244 pp.

Ed., with Kenneth Gouwens, Humanism and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt (Leiden: Brill, 2006), xv + 411 pp.