Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus ( DEZ-i-DEER-ee-əs irr-AZ-məs; Dutch: [ˌdeːziˈdeːrijʏs eːˈrɑsmʏs]; 28 October c. 1466 – 12 July 1536), commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch humanist, Catholic theologian, and pioneering philologist and educationalist. He was, through his writings and translations, one of the most influential scholars of the Northern Renaissance and a major figure of Western culture.
Erasmus was an important figure in Renaissance classical scholarship who wrote in a spontaneous, copious and correct but natural Latin style. As a Catholic priest developing humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared pioneering new Latin and Greek scholarly editions of the New Testament and of the Church Fathers, with annotations and commentary that were immediately and vitally influential in both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation. He also wrote On Free Will, The Praise of Folly, The Complaint of Peace, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style and many other academic, popular and pedagogical works.
Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious reformations and relocated regularly. He influenced a large circle of friends, scholars and correspondents including kings and popes. He developed a biblical humanistic theology in which he advocated the religious and civil necessity both of peaceable concord and of pastoral tolerance on matters of indifference. He remained a member of the Catholic Church all his life, remaining committed to reforming the church from within, but faced dangerous pushback from some university theologians. He promoted what he understood as the traditional doctrine of synergism, which some prominent reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected in favour of the doctrine of monergism. His influential middle-road approach disappointed, and even angered, partisans in both camps.
Erasmus was the most popular, most printed and arguably most influential author of the early sixteenth century, read in all nations in the West and frequently translated. By the 1530s, his writings accounted for 10–20% of book sales in Europe. "Undoubtedly he was the most read author of his age." His vast number of Latin and Greek publications included translations, paraphrases, letters, textbooks, plays for schoolboys, commentary, poems, liturgies, satires, sermons, and prayers. A large number of his later works were defences of his earlier work from attacks by Catholic and Protestant theological and literary opponents.
The Catalogue of the Works of Erasmus (2023) runs to 444 entries (120 pages), almost all from the latter half of his life. He usually wrote books in particular classical literary genres with their different rhetorical conventions: complaint, diatribe, dialogue, encomium, epistle, commentary, liturgy, sermon, etc. His letter to Ulrich von Hutten on Thomas More's household has been called "the first real biography in the real modern sense."
From his youth, Erasmus had been a voracious writer. Erasmus wrote or answered up to 40 letters per day, usually waking early in the morning and writing them in his own hand. He did not work after dinner. His writing method (recommended in De copia and De ratione studii) was to make notes on whatever he was reading, categorised by theme: he carted these commonplaces in boxes that accompanied him. When assembling a new book, he would go through the topics and cross out commonplace notes as he used them. This catalogue of research notes allowed him to rapidly create books, though woven from the same topics. Towards the end of his life, as he lost dexterity, he employed secretaries or amanuenses who performed the assembly or transcription, re-wrote his writing, and in his last decade, recorded his dictation; letters were usually in his own hand, unless formal. For much of his career he wrote standing at a desk, as shown in Dürer's portrait.
In the second half of his life, Erasmus worked on New Testament studies in a project that eventually saw his intended detailed Annotations on the New Testament (modeled on a work by Lorenzo Valla) expand with a revised Vulgate recension, his own new Latin translation, an accompanying Greek text, essays justifying his approach, and lengthy Paraphrases of the entire New Testament except Revelation.
These went through multiple revisions and editions, and progressively involved many leading scholars and introduced several readings which were taken up by Protestant and Catholic reformers. Other publishers, such as Erasmus's earlier collaborator Aldine Press in Venice, immediately brought out their own editions, sometimes with their own corrections, and sometimes without the Annotations, or the Latin, or the Greek. Up to 300,000 copies of the various editions appear to have been printed in Erasmus's lifetime.
This body of work formed the basis for the majority of Textus Receptus Protestant translations of the New Testament in the 16th–19th centuries, including those of Martin Luther, William Tyndale and the King James Version.
Erasmus denied he was making a critical edition: "I certainly did not undertake this task [of revising the New Testament] to provide a standard from which it would not be possible to diverge, but to make a substantial contribution both to the correction and to the understanding of the sacred books." He also later wrote to several Protestant and Catholic friends and critics, notably to his friend Pope Adrian, that "(to be quite frank) had I known that a generation such as this would appear, I should either not have written at all some things that I have written or should have written them differently."
Erasmus mainly wrote for educated audiences. According to biographer Erika Rummel "Three areas preoccupied Erasmus as a writer: language arts, education, and biblical studies. [...]All of his works served as models of style. [...]He pioneered the principles of textual criticism."
As well as books of humanist interests, he wrote extensively on pastoral subjects: "to Christians in the various stages of lives:[...]for the young, for married couples, for widows," the dying, clergy, theologians, religious, princes, partakers of sacraments, etc.
He is noted for his extensive scholarly editions of the New Testament in Latin and Greek, and the complete works of numerous Church Fathers through the Basel publisher/printer Froben. His editions of Greek and Roman moralists and rhetoricians such as Plutarch, Ovid, Ptolemy, Lucian, Seneca and Cicero re-introduced their broader thought to the West. Notable among other books he edited or published himself were Lorenzo Valla's Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum and Thomas More's Epigrammata and Utopia, which he contributed a poem to.
The only works with enduring popularity in modern time are his satires and semi-satires: The Praise of Folly, Julius Excluded from Heaven and The Complaint of Peace. However, his other works, such as his several thousand letters, continue to be a vital source of information to historians of numerous disciplines.
Erasmus's 69 years may be divided into quarters.
First was his medieval Dutch childhood, ending with him being orphaned and impoverished;
Second, his struggling years as a canon (a kind of semi-monk), a clerk, a priest, a failing and sickly university student, a would-be poet, and a tutor;
Third, his flourishing but peripatetic High Renaissance years of increasing focus and literary productivity following his 1499 contact with a reformist English circle notably John Colet and Thomas More, then with radical French Franciscan Jean Vitrier (or Voirier), and later with the Greek-speaking Aldine New Academy in Venice; engaging with leading intellectuals and reform-minded churchmen of the West; and