Thirty years after the publication of the fundamental critical edition of Lorenzo Valla’s letters, edited by Ottavio Besomi and Mariangela Regoliosi (Laurentii Valle Epistole, Padova, 1984), Brendan Cook has brought his important epistolary literature back into the limelight. Despite being composed of only 57 epistles (96 including those addressed to Valla), his correspondence represents an invaluable tool for reconstructing a substantial portion of the humanist’s life. It allows the scholar to follow (at least in part) the affairs of the humanist in his younger years within the circle of the Visconti up until his well-known and fierce dispute with Poggio Bracciolini which began in the '50s. By the same token, the epistles have proven absolutely essential in the reconstruction of the editorial process of several of Valla’s works, the Elegantie lingue latine in particular. In fact, the numerous epistles to Giovanni Tortelli provide information about the various phases of this work, Valla’s readings and corrections, and the definitive publication plan. Never collected by the humanist himself, the letters – thanks to their immediate and genuine nature – offer a different view of Valla as the philologist, the philosopher and the polemicist from the one that we gather from his work. They are decidedly informal in tone, revealing aspects that are particularly and surprisingly domestic. A number of the letters show a man who was often burdened by practical problems, such as the search for a house (letter 46), illness (letter 31), and the death of a loved one (letter 54). As underlined in Cook’s dense introduction, variety is the main characteristic of the epistolary, which extends throughout Valla’s lifetime, providing the critic with a great deal of decisive information.