Exploiting Erasmus

Exploiting Erasmus examines the legacy of Erasmus in England from the mid-sixteenth century to the overthrow of James II in 1688 and studies the various ways in which his works were received, manipulated, and used in religious controversies that threatened both church and state.

Just as the Reformation was a movement of intertwined theological and political aims, many individual authors of the time shifted back and forth between biblical interpretation and political writing. Two foundational figures in the history of the Renaissance Bible, Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale, are cases in point, one writing in Latin, the other in the vernacular. Erasmus undertook the project of retranslating and annotating the New Testament at the same time that he developed rhetorical approaches for addressing princes in his Education of a Christian Prince (1516); Tyndale was occupied with biblically inflected works such as his Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) while translating and annotating the first printed English Bibles. In The Book of Books, Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern England, exploring the uses of the Bible as a supremely authoritative text that was continually transformed for political purposes. In a series of case studies linked to biblical translation, polemical tracts, and works of imaginative literature produced during the reigns of successive English rulers, he investigates the commerce between biblical interpretation, readership, and literary culture. Whereas scholars have often drawn exclusively on modern editions of the King James Version, Fulton turns our attention toward the specific Bibles that writers used and the specific manner in which they used them. In doing so, he argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others were in conversation not just with the biblical text itself, but with the rich interpretive and paratextual structures that accompanied it, revolving around sites of social controversy as well as the larger, often dynastically oriented conditions under which particular Bibles were created.

What did Paul mean when he wrote that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom? Through close analysis of the sixteenth-century reception of Paul's discourses of folly, this book examines the role of the New Testament in the development of what Erasmus and John Calvin refer to as the “Christian philosophy.” Erasmus and Calvin on the Foolishness of God reveals the importance of Pauline rhetoric in the development of humanist critiques of scholasticism while charting the formation of a specifically affective approach to religious epistemology and theological method. As the first book-length examination of Calvin's indebtedness to Erasmus, which also considers the participation of Bullinger, Pellikan, and Melanchthon in an Erasmian exegetical milieu, it is a case study in the complicated cross-confessional exchange of ideas in the sixteenth century. Kirk Essary examines assumptions about the very nature of theology in the sixteenth century, how it was understood by leading humanist reformers, and how ideas about philosophy and rhetoric were received, appropriated, and shared in a complex intellectual and religious context.

The authors strive to illuminate every aspect of Erasmus’ life, work, and legacy while providing an expert synthesis of the most inspiring research in the field. There is no volume to compare or to compete with this compendium of all Erasmian knowledge.

The translation of Erasmus's Manual of the Christian Soldier, thought to be by William Tyndale, is one of the foundational texts of the English Reformation. The present edition is based for the first time on the recently-discovered manuscript dating from 1523. It is accompanied by translations of other key religious works, Erasmus's treatise on the Lord's Prayer and the introduction to the New Testament; by the anti-papal satire, Julius Exclusus; and by the Epistle in Praise of Matrimony and the Proverbs, both translated by the English Erasmian, Richard Taverner, in support of Thomas Cromwell's reformist agenda.

Erasmus was not only one of the most widely read authors of the early modern period, but one of the most controversial. For some readers he represented the perfect humanist scholar; for others, he was an arrogant hypercritic, a Lutheran heretic and polemicist, a virtuoso writer and rhetorician, an inventor of a new, authentic Latin style, etc. In the present volume, a number of aspects of Erasmus’s manifold reception are discussed, especially lesser-known ones, such as his reception in Neo-Latin poetry. The volume does not focus only on so-called Erasmians, but offers a broader spectrum of reception and demonstrates that Erasmus’s name also was used in order to authorize completely un-Erasmian ideals, such as atheism, radical reformation, Lutheranism, religious intolerance, Jesuit education, Marian devotion, etc. Contributors include: Philip Ford, Dirk Sacré, Paul J. Smith, Lucia Felici, Gregory D. Dodds, Hilmar M. Pabel, Reinier Leushuis, Jeanine De Landtsheer, Johannes Trapman, and Karl Enenkel.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. However, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.

“I no sooner perceived myself in the world,” wrote English philosopher John Locke, “than I found myself in a storm.” The storm of which Locke spoke was the maelstrom of religious fanaticism and intolerance that was tearing apart the social fabric of European society. His response was A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), arguably the most important defense of religious freedom in the Western tradition. In God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West, historian Joseph Loconte offers a groundbreaking study of Locke’s Letter, challenging the notion that decisive arguments for freedom of conscience appeared only after the onset of the secular Enlightenment. Loconte argues that Locke’s vision of a tolerant and pluralistic society was based on a radical reinterpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus. In this, Locke drew great strength from an earlier religious reform movement, namely, the Christian humanist tradition. Like no thinker before him, Locke forged an alliance between liberal political theory and a gospel of divine mercy. God, Locke, and Liberty suggests how a better understanding of Locke’s political theology could calm the storms of religious violence that once again threaten international peace and security. To read an interview with the author about the book on Patheos.com, see here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/01/10/under-locke-and-key/