Valla Lorenzo (c.1407–57), Italian humanist and historian who taught rhetoric in Pavia and was later secretary of King Alfonso I of Aragona in Naples, and apostolic secretary in Rome under Pope Nicholas V. In his dialogue On Pleasure or On the True Good (1431–34), Stoic and Epicurean interlocutors present their ethical views, which Valla proceeds to criticize from a Christian point of view. This work is often regarded as a defense of Epicurean hedonism, because Valla equates the good with pleasure; but he claims that Christians can find pleasure only in heaven. His description of the Christian pleasures reflects the contemporary Renaissance attitude toward the joys of life and might have contributed to Valla’s reputation for hedonism. In the later work, On Free Will (between 1435 and 1448), Valla discusses the conflict between divine foreknowledge and human freedom and rejects Boethius’s then predominantly accepted solution. Valla distinguishes between God’s knowledge and God’s will, but denies that there is a rational solution of the apparent conflict between God’s will and human freedom. As a historian, he is famous for The Donation of Constantine (1440), which denounces as spurious the famous document on which medieval jurists and theologians based the papal rights to secular power. P.Ga.