Humanism’s most explosive product was a method: date a text by its own language. In 1440 Lorenzo Valla turned it on the charter by which the papacy claimed temporal rule over the West. Click each underlined detail, judge how early it could possibly have been written, and watch the document’s earliest possible date ratchet forward past the emperor who supposedly signed it.
The documentclick the details
A plain-English condensation of the Constitutum Constantini, the charter in which the emperor Constantine, healed of leprosy and baptised, is made to hand the West to Pope Sylvester. Ten details are underlined. Not all of them are wrong.
The Donation of Constantine · purporting to be issued at Rome, c. AD 315–317
0 of 10 examined—
Earliest possible dateit only moves forward
A text can be no older than the newest thing in it. Each anachronism you confirm drags the whole charter forward; nothing ever drags it back.
Pick a detailChoose any underlined phrase on the left. You will be asked one question about it: how early could a Latin writer have produced that? Then you will be told what Valla saw.