The dialogical structure of Lorenzo Valla’s De professione religiosorum
Abstract
Lorenzo Valla's De professione religiosorum presents a disputatio between a friar and the author regarding the prerogatives of individuals who have taken vows in a religious order. The core of the argumentation revolves around discussing whether it is right to assert that those who belong to an order, being subjected to greater punishments for violating their vows and choosing a life of obedience, poverty, and chastity, thereby have greater advantages to be deemed worthy of salvation. Lorenzo Valla argues favorably for a secular, active, and free life, employing a series of philological and rhetorical arguments to support his perspective. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the strategies through which Valla constructs the dialogical structure of De professione religiosorum to demonstrate the superiority of his skeptical reasoning, considering the general framework of the dialogical genre in the Quattrocento and Valla's dialogues De voluptate (or De vero bono) and De libero arbitrio.
Keywords
De professione religiosorum, Lorenzo Valla, dialogue, RenaissanceReferences
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