De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (On the Donation of Constantine)

De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione, known as On the Donation of Constantine, Lorenzo Valla's 1440 treatise, is the foundational philological work that demonstrated the supposed imperial grant of authority from Constantine to the pope was a medieval forgery, using textual and historical analysis of the document's own language and anachronisms. Valla's authority rests on that close philological argument, which later scholarship has upheld as essentially correct. Its limit is that it is a fifteenth century polemical treatise, written in the context of Valla's own political and ecclesiastical disputes, not a neutral modern textual history. Cite it for the forgery argument itself; a modern account of the Donation's history needs a dedicated scholarly study.