Note 422 — CHAP. XI.
Reading edition
Tiraboschi Storia della letter. Ital. tom. vi. p. ii. p. 303. If credit may be given to Valla’s own assertion, his introduction into the world was announced in a supernatural manner. He boasts in his Antidotus, p. 191, that his mother being ignorant that she was pregnant, was apprized of that circumstance by the interposition of an oracle, which informed her that she would be brought to bed of a son, and gave particular directions with respect to her offspring’s name. It might have been reasonably conjectured that this oracle was some experienced matron; but by the subsequent part of Valla’s narration, it seems that the important admonition in question proceeded from one of the saints.