From Erasmus To Maius

Volume 18 in the Collected Works of Erasmus series covers the period from 1 April 1531 to 30 March 1532. The most persistent theme in the letters is the fear, to which Erasmus had long been prey, that the religious strife in Germany and Switzerland would eventually lead to armed conflict. His Catholic and Evangelical critics continued to annoy him. In June 1531 Erasmus published his final apologia against Alberto Pio, who had accused him of being the source of the Lutheran heresy. Though Erasmus’ public controversy with the Strasbourg theologians had come to an end in 1530, he wrote a long letter to Martin Bucer emphasizing his doctrinal differences with the Strasbourgers and his low estimate of their moral character. Erasmus’ financial affairs also figure prominently in the letters between him and his friend, the banker Erasmus Schets. The letters between them are testimony to his impatience with people who owed him money, his frequent inability to understand the details of his own finances, and his quickness to assume that people he trusted were cheating him. Volume 18 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series

Offers biographical information about the more than 1900 people mentioned in the correspondence and works of Erasmus who died after 1450 and were thus approximately his contemporaries.

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.

Assembled for the young Prince William of Cleves, Erasmus’ Apophthegmata consists of thousands of sayings and anecdotes collected from Greek and Latin literature for the moral education of the future ruler. Betty I. Knott and Elaine Fantham’s two-volume annotated translation of the aphorisms and Erasmus’ commentary on them makes this once popular literary and educational text accessible to modern audiences. The introduction discusses the origins of the Apophthegmata, the contents of the collection, and Erasmus’ sources. Volumes 37 and 38 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series – Two-volume set.

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.