Search results for ""Author Desiderius Erasmus""

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was a Dutch humanist, scholar, and social critic, and one of the most important figures of the Renaissance. The Praise of Folly is perhaps his best-known work. Originally written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, this satiric celebration of pleasure, youth, and intoxication irreverently pokes fun at the pieties of theologians and the foibles that make us all human, while ultimately reaffirming the value of Christian ideals. No other book displays quite so completely the transition from the medieval to the modern world, and Erasmus's wit, wisdom, and critical spirit have lost none of their timeliness today. This Princeton Classics edition of The Praise of Folly features a new foreword by Anthony Grafton that provides an essential introduction to this iridescent and enduring masterpiece.

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Erasmus produced his five editions of the New Testament in Greek and Latin and his Paraphrases on the Gospels and Epistles almost contemporaneously with the tumultuous events that accompanied the beginnings of the Reformation in Europe. At the same time, his scholarship was a signal illustration of the Christian Humanism of northern Europe. His remarkable scholarship is translated and annotated in the Collected Works of Erasmus, volumes 42-60, published by the University of Toronto Press. This volume, CWE 41, seeks to set in perspective in a major introductory essay the full range of that scholarship. It traces the origin of Erasmus' work and its development over the course of the last two decades of his life, placing the work on the New Testament in the context of his life and the political and religious events of his age, revealing the endeavour as a process, and thus giving the reader illuminating points of reference for the many cryptic allusions in his annotations and paraphrases. The book includes an annotated translation of three of Erasmus' major writings on Scripture and its interpretation -- the Paraclesis, the Ratio verae theologiae ('System of True Theology'), and the Apologia (defense of his work). It includes as well some of his further attempts to clarify his endeavour -- relevant letters and a vitriolic response to his 'crabby critics' (Contra morosos). The volume offers a unique insight into the production of Erasmus' scholarship in book form, illustrating abundantly the special features that made his editions of the New Testament and his Paraphrases both esthetically pleasing and effectively marketable products.

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Besides the celebrated Praise of Folly, Robert M. Adams has included the political "Complaint of Peace," the brutal antipapal satire "Julius Excluded from Heaven," two versions of Erasmus’s important preface to the Latin translation of the New Testament, and a selection both serious and comic of his Colloquies and his letters. Adams has made these selections to emphasize the humane, rather than the doctrinaire, side of the first and arguably greatest humanist. Critical commentary is provided in essays by H. R. Trevor-Roper, R. S. Allen, J. Huizinga, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and Robert M. Adams. Also included are a Chronology of Erasmus’s life and a Selected Bibliography.

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In addition to a sparkling modern translation of Praise of Folly, this volume also includes other works by Erasmus: Pope Julius Barred from Heaven, Epigram against Pope Julius II and a selection of his Adages. Together with the extensive annotation of the texts, these help to set Erasmus’s masterpiece in an accessible context for the modern reader. A central text of the Renaissance, Praise of Folly is an essential part of the Western canon, without which much that has followed – in culture, theology and literature – would not exist. Deeply subversive in its time, the book, after the initial controversy it created, finally gained acceptance as theologians, philosophers and readers came to appreciate Erasmus’s lucid, playful and eloquent reasoning.

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Despite having enemies in the powerful Spanish religious orders, and being warned of the controversies that would arise, Erasmus published the fourth edition of his New Testament in 1527, resulting in a major crisis for Erasmianism in Spain. This period is marked by a bitter dispute between Erasmus and the conservative elements in Spain, involving behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, where it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe. Following this tension, a confrontation culminated in the Valladolid conference where enemies of Erasmus were obliged to come forward and where, following these events, Erasmus himself was forced to respond publicly to the charges brought against him. The three texts in the present volume were written by Erasmus in response to his antagonists, and include An Apologia of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam Against Several Articles Presented by Certain Monks in Spain, The Answer of Desiderius Erasmus to the Pamphlet of a Certain Fever-ridden Individual, and Letter to Certain Highly Impudent Jackdaws.

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Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466-1536) is one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance humanist movement, which abandoned medieval pieties in favour of a rich new vision of the individual's potential. Praise of Folly, written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, is Erasmus's best-known work. Its dazzling mixture of fantasy and satire is narrated by a personification of Folly, dressed as a jester, who celebrates youth, pleasure, drunkenness and sexual desire, and goes on to lambast human pretensions, foibles and frailties, to mock theologians and monks and to praise the 'folly' of simple Christian piety. Erasmus's wit, wordplay and wisdom made the book an instant success, but it also attracted what may have been sales-boosting criticism. The Letter to Maarten van Dorp, which is a defence of his ideas and methods, is also included.

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This volume comprises Erasmus' correspondence during the final two years of his life, June 1534–August 1536. In the public sphere it was a time of dramatic events: the reconquest of the duchy Württemberg from its Austrian occupiers; the siege and destruction of the Anabaptist "kingdom" at Münster; Charles V's great victory at Tunis; and the resumption of the Habsburg-Valois wars in Italy. In the private sphere, these were years of deteriorating health, thoughts of impending death, and the loss of close friends (including Thomas Fisher and Thomas More, both executed by Henry VIII). At the same time, however, Erasmus managed to publish his longest book, Ecclesiastes, and to make arrangements, in his final will, for his considerable wealth to be spent for charitable purposes after his death.

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Erasmus yearned to make the New Testament an effective instrument of reform in society, church, and everyday life, and to this end he composed the Paraphrases, in which the words of Holy Scripture provide the core of a text that was vastly expanded to embrace the reforming "philosophy of Christ." Paraphrase on Luke 1-10 contains the first half of Erasmus's Paraphrase on Luke - the second half of which appeared in this series in 2003 - and completes the set of translations of the Paraphrases into English. In his Paraphrase on Luke, Erasmus expands on the original Gospel of Luke in the voice of its original author. The narrative is supplemented by Erasmus' explications of the text's moral, theological, and allegorical meanings and its psychological, historical, and geographical context. In addition to a fluid and idiomatic translation, Paraphrase on Luke 1-10 includes extensive annotations for the general or scholarly reader, making this a valuable and accessible resource for the study of both Erasmus and the New Testament. Volume 47 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

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Third and expanded edition with a new biography of Erasmus.

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First published in Paris in 1511, The Praise of Folly hasenjoyed enormous and highly controversial success from the author’s lifetime down to our own day.It hasno rival, except perhaps Thomas More’s Utopia, as the most intense and lively presentation of the literary, social, and theological aims and methods of Northern Humanism. Clarence H. Miller’s highly praised translation of The Praise of Folly, based on the definitive Latin text, echoes Erasmus’ own lively style while retaining the nuances of the original text. In his introduction, Miller places the work in the context of Erasmus as humanist and theologian. In a new afterword, William H. Gass playfully considers the meaning, or meanings, of folly and offers fresh insights into one of the great books of Western literature.Praise for the earlier edition:“An eminently reliable and fully annotated edition based on the Latin text.”—Library Journal“Exciting and brilliant, this is likely to be the definitive translation of The Praise of Folly intoEnglish.”—Richard J. Schoeck

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In the months covered by this volume, Erasmus experienced sharply deteriorating health and thoughts of approaching death, although he remained active in the promotion of good causes and the defence of his good name. The seemingly imminent threat of religious civil war in Germany affected Erasmus in two ways. First, he made up his mind to leave Germany and return to his native Brabant. However, the arrival in 1533 of a formal invitation from Queen Mary, regent of the Netherlands, coincided with the onset of chronic ill health that would last until the end of his life. Repeated postponements eventually led to an abandonment of the journey altogether. Second, Erasmus did what he could to promote the cause of religious unity. In On Mending the Peace of the Church he urged rulers to enact moderate reforms that would satisfy all parties and avoid confessional division. When Martin Luther responded to this attempt at a "middle path" between "truth and error" in his Letter Concerning Erasmus of Rotterdam (1534), denouncing Erasmus as a skeptic and not a Christian, Erasmus responded indignantly with his Purgation against the Slanderous Letter of Luther. Erasmus’ only other work published in this period turned out to be one of his most popular, On Preparing for Death.

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This volume includes Erasmus’ correspondence for the months April 1532 to April 1533, a period in which he feared a religious civil war in Germany. In his desire to move somewhere far enough from Germany to be safe and yet not so far that an old man could not undertake the journey, Erasmus eventually decided to accept the invitation from Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands, to return to his native Brabant. In March 1533, the terms of Erasmus’ return were settled and in July they were formally approved by the emperor. But by this time Erasmus’ fragile health had already declined to the point that he could not undertake the journey, and he would never recover sufficiently to do so. The works published in the months covered by this volume include the eighth, much-enlarged edition of the Adagia, and the Explanatio symboli, the catechism that delighted Erasmus’ followers but gave Martin Luther much ammunition for a brutal attack on him in his Epistola de Erasmo Roterodamo of 1534.

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Erasmus’ thorough engagement with the New Testament, in particular his revision of the Vulgate translation, aroused much controversy, especially in the orthodox Roman Catholic country of Spain. Erasmus had to fight fierce polemics with several people, including two Spanish scholars, Diego López Zúñiga and Sancho Carranza de Miranda, who were both connected to the University of Alcalà. This quarrel lasted from 1520 to 1524, with a late response by Erasmus in 1529. The discussion started as a philological one, regarding "correct" Latin, but turned into a dogmatic-theological fight over the issues of whether the New Testament speaks of Christ as God, whether one can apply the term servus (servant) to Christ, and whether the sacramental character of matrimony can be deduced from Ephesians 5:32. The six texts in this volume are here translated and annotated for the first time. With elucidating notes and an introduction, the volume offers wonderful insight into a fierce and fundamental polemic over the New Testament

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This volume contains the surviving correspondence of Erasmus for the first seven months of 1529. For nearly eight years he had lived happily and productively in Basel. In the winter of 1528-9, however, the Swiss version of the Lutheran Reformation triumphed in the city, destroying the liberal-reformist atmosphere Erasmus had found so congenial. Unwilling to live in a place where Catholic doctrine and practice were officially proscribed, Erasmus resettled in the quiet, reliably Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau, Despite the turmoil of moving, Erasmus managed to complete the new Froben editions of Seneca and St Augustine, both monumental projects that had been underway for years. He also found time to engage in controversy with his conservative Catholic critics, as well as to write a long letter lamenting the execution for heresy of his friend Louis de Berquin at Paris. Volume 15 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

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Many of the letters in this volume, which covers the period August 1530 to March 1531, reflect Erasmus' anxieties over events at the Diet of Augsburg (June-November 1530), at which the first of many attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement of the religious division in Germany came to a rancorous conclusion, thus fostering the fear that religious controversy would eventually lead to war. His other chief concerns were the continued attacks on him by Catholic critics who regarded him as a clandestine Lutheran, and the insistence of many evangelical reformers that he was their spiritual father. The literary output of the period covered includes major works aimed at members of both groups. Volume 17 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

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In 1520, the reading public witnessed the eruption of a simmering conflict between Erasmus, the foremost advocate of the new biblical humanism, and Edward Lee, a younger scholar at the University of Louvain and spokesman for the traditionalists in matters of biblical interpretation and church discipline. When Erasmus (perhaps unconsciously) subsumed criticisms Lee had sent to him of his 1516 Annotations on the New Testament into the second edition (1519) without properly crediting their source, Lee resorted to publication of his collection of criticisms. Erasmus responded immediately with the Apologia which is neither arrogant nor biting nor angry nor aggressive, and which responds to the two invectives of Edward Lee, describing his version of the history of the dispute with Lee, and less than two months later produced Responses to Lee's criticisms. This new volume in the Collected Works of Erasmus series contains the first-ever English translations of the Apology and the Responses. These two pieces display Erasmus the humanist in the thick of academic turmoil, deploying all the rhetorical weapons at his command. The volume is an entertaining and informative look into Erasmus as a scholar and as a man. Volume 72 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

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As part of his effort to make the Bible an effective instrument of reform in society, church, and everyday life, Erasmus composed the Paraphrases. In these series of texts, the Holy Scripture provides the core of a work that is vastly expanded to embrace the reforming "philosophy of Christ" in all of its forms. This volume contains two sets of Paraphrases, one on the Corinthian letters (circa. 1519), and the other on the group of letters from the Ephesians to the Thessalonians (circa. 1520). The first set presents an epistolary narrative which not only enlivens the events described but revisits them from a sixteenth-century perspective. Together, they form a sharpened portrait of the primitive Corinthian church and an intriguing critique of the church as it was in Erasmus's time. The second set, Ephesians to Thessalonians, offers an interpretation of Pauline theology with humanistic overtones that are distinctively Erasmian. In these Paraphrases, we see the craft of the philologist at work in the articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, the humanist depicting Christ with an unmistakably human sensibility, and the artist discussing familiar theological virtues of faith and love in a new way. Apart from providing the first complete English translations of these Paraphrases since 1549, this volume gives excellent insight into the fundamentals of Erasmian theology and includes annotations which highlight the historical and linguistic implications of Erasmus's original texts. Volume 43 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

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The year that began in August 1515 was the annus mirabilis of Erasmus' career, the year, notably of the epistles of St Jerome and the first edition of his New Testament. In the months following, covered in this volume of the CWE, from August 1516 to June 1517, the active exchange of letters that began with volume 3 continued, giving a vivid impression of the impact of Erasmus' great achievement upon his contemporaries. In his own words, "The New Testament has made me friends everywhere." To Erasmus, the most important event of these months was intensely private, the dispensation granted by Leo X allowing him to escape permanently from the restraints of his religious community, to earn his living with the freedom of a secular priest. In elucidating the complex circumstances surrounding this crucial development in Erasmus' career, Dr McConica advances a new view of the obscure circumstances surrounding Erasmus' illegitimacy. We are also given Erasmus' thinly veiled account of his boyhood in the "Letter to Grunnius," and, in an Appendix, the closely related account in the Compendium vitae, a vital if controversial document for our knowledge of his early life. In the background are the life and enterprise of the Low Countries. Pursuit of personal promotion, the politics of the Burgundian Court, and the emergence of the young Prince Charles-soon to be Charles V-in the European scene, provide further tuition for the great humanist in the use and abuse of princely power. In this volume Erasmus moves between the Burgundian court at Brussels and the domestic quiet of Pieter Gillis' household at Antwerp, where he was prearing further work for the Froben press at Basel. He is drawn to Louvain but avoids it, fearing a scrutiny of his works by the hostile theologians of the University. The England of Tunstall and More is always at hand, and the letters of volume 4 incidentally provide the most important chronicle for the publication of More's Utopia, over which Erasmus kept a watchful eye. This volume records important developments in Erasmus' many-faceted philosophy, especially in politics and education. There is the sharpest condemnation of princely power beneath the veil of rhetorical courtesy, with classical statements of Erasmus' programme for men of education and Christan principle, the rulers upon whom he rested his hope for the reform of Christiandom. Educated Europe now waited upon Erasmus' words, and, as a French humanist writes, "Words never fail him; and such words!" Volume 4 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series

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At the beginning of this volume, Erasmus leaves Louvain to live in Basel. Weary from the many controversies reflected in the letters of the previous volumes, he is also anxious to see the annotations to his third edition of the New Testament through Johann Froben's press. Above all he fears that pressure from the imperial court in the Netherlands will force him to take a public stand against Luther. Erasmus completes a large number of works in the span of this volume, including the Paraphrases on Matthew and John, two new expanded editions of the Colloquies, an edition of De conscribendis epistolis, two apologiae against his Spanish detractors, and editions of Arnobius Junior and Hilary of Poitiers. But the predominant theme of the volume remains 'the sorry business of Luther.' The harder Erasmus persists in trying to adhere to a reasonable course between Catholic and reforming zealots, the more he finds himself 'a heretic to both sides.' His Catholic critics appear the more dangerous. Among them are the papal nuncio Girolamo Aleandro, who is bent on discrediting him at both the imperial and papal courts as a supporter of Luther; the Spaniard Diego L pez Z iga, who compiles a catalogue of Blasphemies and Impieties of Erasmus of Rotterdam; and the Carmelite Nicholaas Baechem, who denounces Erasmus both in public sermons and at private 'drinking-parties.' Erasmus' refusal to counsel severity against the Lutherans is motivated chiefly by concern for peace and the common good of Christendom, and not by any tender regard for Luther and the other reformers. Still, many of the letters in this volume testify to his growing aversion to the reformers, and we see him moving perceptibly in the direction of his eventual public breach with them. A special feature of this volume is the first fully annotated translation of Erasmus' Catalogues Iucubrationum (Ep 1341 A), an extremely important document for the study of Erasmus' life and works and of the controversies they aroused. Volume 9 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

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Erasmus yearned to make the Bible an effective instrument in the reform of society, church, and everyday life. He therefore composed paraphrases in which the words of Holy Scripture provided the core of a text, vastly expanded to embrace the reforming 'philosophy of Christ.' The Paraphrases were successful beyond all expectations, and were quickly translated into French, German, English, and other languages. This is the fourth volume of Paraphrases to be published in the New Testament Scholarship Series in the CWE. The volume includes the Paraphrases on the Pastoral Epistles and the Catholic, or General, Epistles, as well as the Paraphrase on Hebrews. These books, in the biblical text, address the central issues of the Christian life within the context of family, church, and community. The Paraphrases sharpen the accent of the biblical message, speaking in an idiom appropriate to the sixteenth century but also surprisingly relevant to our own age: they condemn, for example, every form of tyrannizing in the home and self-aggrandisement in the church; perhaps above all, the Paraphrases expose the social injustice (inevitable, Erasmus would have us believe) of those who have acquired great personal wealth. Erasmus also reformulates, and sometimes develops, some of the great theological themes already defined in earlier volumes of this series. Is sin congenital, or do we sin simply in 'imitation' of Adam? How do the Hebrew Scriptures attest to the presence of divine grace in the world before the birth of Christ? What is faith if not a vision of eternal realities so sure that we can clearly recognize the things of this passing world as the shadows they are? These Paraphrases address the modern reader with the relevance of the moral issues they define and the perennial importance of the theological questions they raise. Erasmus clarified and interpreted biblical text with immense rhetorical skill. Volume 44 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

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