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1:44

Erasmus of Rotterdam is probably a

1:46

name that you know. In the 16th century,

1:48

he was about as famous as anybody could

1:51

be. A sort of intellectual

1:53

hero. Like today's guest

1:55

has suggested Albert Einstein or Stephen

1:57

Hawking. It's rather amazing he became

1:59

so. Born the illegitimate

2:01

son of a priest, Erasmus did not

2:03

have the greatest of starts in life.

2:06

But hard work and natural brilliance made

2:08

him one of the greatest scholars of

2:10

his age. As such,

2:13

he offered something radical, a

2:15

vision of a humanist philosophy of Christ.

2:18

He was critical of hypocrisy but shamelessly

2:20

in search of fame. He

2:22

believed in independence, but sought the

2:24

attention of the rich and powerful. He

2:27

practiced a spirit of constructive debate and

2:29

tolerance from which we could learn,

2:31

but he was anti-Semitic. In

2:34

other words, he certainly had his flaws

2:36

that he was a gifted writer,

2:38

ironic, playful and intelligent. He

2:41

was perhaps the first public intellectual of

2:43

the modern age. He called to scholars

2:45

to perform the sort of scholarship that

2:47

contributed to the public good. Like

2:49

anyone who rises high, Erasmus gathered many

2:52

critics and enemies. To Martin

2:54

Luther's mind, he did not go far enough. To

2:56

Roman Catholic scholars, he was heretical. Erasmus

3:00

lived in a transitional era. As

3:02

himself a transformative and quintessential figure,

3:05

he gives us a window onto

3:07

his times. Today

3:09

I welcome onto the podcast Professor

3:11

William Barker, Ingalls Professor and former

3:13

President of the University of King's

3:16

College and Emeritus Professor of English

3:18

at Dalhousie University. Professor

3:20

Barker has taken Erasmus' enormous oeuvre

3:22

and long life and

3:25

packed both into a wonderfully entertaining

3:27

and succinct book in Reaction Books

3:29

series on Renaissance Lives, Erasmus

3:32

of Rotterdam, The Spirit of a

3:34

Scholar. It's the first English language

3:37

biography of Erasmus in 30 years. Welcome

3:45

to not just the Tudors. Thank you very

3:47

much. It is a real

3:49

pleasure to have you here to talk

3:51

about one of the most famous and

3:53

important people of the early modern period

3:56

and one whose name I think many

3:58

people have been. will

4:00

know, but they perhaps might not know that

4:02

much more. And also

4:04

because you have written this wonderful

4:06

little book about Erasmus that seems

4:08

to me to embody precisely

4:11

what Erasmus cared about, which

4:13

is writing in excellent prose

4:15

for the public something

4:18

which serves up the ideas of scholarship. So

4:20

this is a real joy to read your

4:22

book. It was an interesting project

4:24

to try to do. Erasmus is like trying

4:26

to drink from a fire hose. There is

4:29

an incredible amount of material to look at

4:31

and to read about. And then when you've

4:33

read about him, you read about all the

4:35

people he knew, which is quite a massive

4:37

task. Yes. So just, and I asked this

4:40

as a writer myself, how did you

4:42

go about distilling all of that into

4:44

something which in the end is relatively

4:46

some volume? A page

4:48

a day. Because there was so much to

4:51

find out about each thing. So I knew

4:53

how to break it down when I started

4:56

because I decided I would just go

4:58

chronologically through his life. But then it

5:00

was really a bit by bit. And

5:02

then rewriting when I finally had a

5:04

complete story there. So I saw his

5:07

life in three parts really, and

5:09

it breaks down quite well that way.

5:11

But by the time you get to the third

5:13

part, there's so many things happening. You

5:16

lose track of the chronology because there

5:18

are six or seven different stories all

5:20

happening at the same time. Because he

5:22

was involved in so many controversies and

5:24

debates and so on. And to try

5:26

and follow the streams of that is

5:28

difficult. Well, let's think about

5:31

him following that tripartite structure,

5:33

then. Your first

5:35

part is preparation. And

5:38

this takes us through his formative years up until the

5:40

age of 34. What

5:43

did Erasmus want us to know of that

5:45

period? Yes, it is

5:48

what Erasmus wanted us to know is what

5:50

we know, because he rewrote

5:52

his own biography several times in

5:54

order to get himself released from

5:57

his monastic obligations by the end.

5:59

end of that period he had left.

6:01

That takes him up to really

6:03

1499 is really the transition point

6:06

in his life and up until then he's no

6:09

one of interest really except for a very small

6:11

number of people who happened to be interested in

6:13

him as a scholar because he was a very

6:15

talented student but he came from an illegitimate son

6:17

of a priest and that meant every time he

6:19

wanted to do anything in the church he had

6:22

to get special dispensation in the end from the

6:24

pulp to hold property to

6:26

dress as a secular priest instead

6:28

of as a member of this

6:30

Augustinian canon, regular he was, and

6:32

to move out of that and

6:34

not have to report in regularly

6:37

as he had to do in the early years back

6:39

to Superior to tell him what he was up to.

6:42

He lived like another landish priest at the

6:44

time or low country's priest and

6:47

Rabant was his area and then it

6:49

was only when he got to England

6:52

that he suddenly began to travel in

6:54

a different circle and that was really

6:56

a life changer for him I think

6:58

and even though he had been in

7:00

Paris and studied at the university there he

7:02

really detested the kind of things he had

7:05

to study which is scholastic philosophy and

7:07

he was kind of a dropout, hanger

7:10

on kind of grad student tutoring

7:12

people for a number of years and writing

7:14

little textbooks for them which later

7:16

on turned into big textbooks because he

7:18

had a tendency all his career to

7:20

expand everything that he did. He would

7:22

write a small book then would expand

7:24

it and would get bigger and bigger

7:26

until it was multi-volume sometimes. And

7:29

I hadn't realised before I read your

7:31

book that it's

7:33

because of his illegitimate birth that he

7:36

really only had the one name and

7:38

he's like Madonna isn't he? He was

7:40

Erasmus. Yes he was Erasmus

7:42

and he had a father with

7:44

a regular name but he dropped

7:47

that and kept to the

7:49

Erasmus and then Erasmus Chose

7:51

the Desiderius. The Erasmus is a kind

7:53

of Greek form and then he chose

7:55

a more Latin form of that and

7:57

then he added quite late on. Actually,

8:00

after this English period, the of

8:02

Rotterdam. And. That's with

8:04

his the only way we know who's

8:07

born in Rotterdam because he grew up

8:09

in Canada which is so surprise damn

8:11

and that's what we have records us

8:13

and we know we went to school

8:16

in how down into Venturi in that

8:18

he was said to Setauket voice small

8:20

town where Bosh the painter came from

8:23

also lived it and there he had

8:25

a very unpleasant schooling experience to so

8:27

he ended up really hating school and

8:30

university and yet he became the leading

8:32

scholar of his time. It is

8:34

an interesting paradox that he is

8:36

just about always seeking to escape

8:38

from whatever kind us clerical, all

8:40

monastic commitments he has. and he

8:42

doesn't take off of position in

8:44

the academy and yet a career

8:46

in the church or in the

8:48

university is the obvious place for

8:50

a man of his mind and

8:52

his qualities. Years he taught at

8:54

Cambridge but he had never had an

8:56

official university position. He taught and lose

8:58

our for number of years the College

9:01

of Three Languages that Have Friends is

9:03

founded on. Never really had a very

9:05

good relationship with that universities. they allowed

9:07

him to be there, was a member

9:09

but you never turned into a professor.

9:11

really have any time he was just

9:13

doing his own work, will spare time

9:15

and new Eighty two been on the

9:17

side. And. You mentioned

9:19

his antipathy towards scholastic

9:22

philosophy in Paris. Could.

9:24

We briefly gloss what we mean

9:26

by scholastic, fluffy and sort of

9:29

humanism that Erasmus develops. I mean,

9:31

would it be sad to say

9:33

that so Erasmus it was about

9:35

scholarship that list for the public

9:37

good. That. counted the or it

9:39

was what drove him he was very

9:42

attracted early on to a classical writers

9:44

in supposed to have known horace all

9:46

by heart quite early on and terrence

9:48

playwright and so he really loved that

9:51

kind of writing and he found that

9:53

in the scholastic floss be where you're

9:55

really trying to work through very close

9:57

arguments on the meanings of words and

10:00

definitions and so

10:02

on of particular things like what is a

10:04

soul exactly where there are its limits and

10:06

so on and the methods are

10:08

taken from Aristotle and from the whole

10:10

tradition that follows that and he realized

10:12

that there were good philosophers for instance

10:15

someone like Aquinas he accepted Aquinas as

10:17

being a great philosopher but that's not

10:19

what he felt people like

10:21

him really wanted to read or hear about

10:24

and so what you had is people coming from that training

10:26

going into churches and giving sermons

10:29

to people based on these

10:31

sort of very detailed examinations

10:33

of particular issues questions that

10:35

might come up of ethical

10:38

types or whatever and solved using

10:40

syllogisms and things like that and

10:42

he was much more interested in storytelling

10:45

and in metaphor in the language

10:47

of the classical writers for using to

10:50

explain ethical behavior so often in

10:53

a writer like Plutarch there exemplifies

10:55

people they show you how people

10:58

do things by their deeds and

11:00

by their actions and so on

11:02

and the poetry tells you things

11:04

metaphorically and that he felt is

11:06

a much more direct form of communication with

11:09

people and that of

11:11

course turns into his total commitment

11:13

to the New Testament where he

11:15

felt that people were getting the

11:17

word of Christ filtered through a

11:19

kind of scholastic lens and

11:21

for him Jesus was a storyteller an

11:24

ethical leader as well and someone who

11:26

was clear and used parables to explain

11:28

things and so that kind of language

11:31

was much more acceptable and that's why

11:33

he ended up doing the addition of

11:35

the New Testament he did that in

11:38

1516 and kept revising it and

11:41

also rewrote the Bible into a

11:43

series of paraphrases and the

11:45

paraphrases they were translating English and

11:47

then placed in all the English

11:49

churches every church had to

11:51

have Erasmus's paraphrases because those were

11:54

seen as a simple clear guide

11:56

and entry point into religion rather

11:58

than the sort of more squirreled

12:00

scholastic and detailed approach that was taken

12:02

in the late medieval. One

12:04

of the things that emerges as

12:06

being central to the humanist programme,

12:08

and indeed the first of his

12:11

proverbs in his adages reflects

12:13

this, is friendship. He

12:15

has this network of intellectuals who

12:17

are former kind of community around

12:20

him, and this is absolutely vital

12:22

for him, especially, as you've

12:24

mentioned, his friends in England. Can

12:27

you tell us a bit about that

12:30

community and those friends and what

12:32

difference that made? The friendship fangles

12:34

quite far back in his own

12:36

writing career, and he's

12:38

really piggybacking on something that had

12:40

started in Italy, which is this

12:42

idea of a republic of letters,

12:44

the kind of way of exchanging

12:46

information and stories and letters amongst

12:49

a group of people who are

12:51

equally educated and who like to

12:53

talk about what they do, and some of

12:56

that turned into learned society, some of it

12:58

just stayed as correspondents as in Erasmus' case.

13:02

These friends are an interesting feature because,

13:04

in a way, some of them aren't

13:06

that close to them, but they're called

13:08

a friend, and then others really

13:10

are. So someone like Thomas More in England, who

13:12

he got to know when he first went to

13:14

England in 1499, he got

13:16

to know More quite well, and they became

13:19

quite close, and they did translations together for

13:21

the fun of it. It's been a fun

13:23

evening together, translating Lucian from the Greek and

13:26

setting each other little competitions and things

13:28

like that, and then afterwards writing letters

13:30

very often back and forth to each

13:32

other. And this combination, Erasmus actually liked

13:35

to show to people, so he began

13:37

to publish his letters just about the

13:39

same time he published the New Testament,

13:41

and showing people what this community looked

13:43

like, this republic of letters that he

13:46

was in. And people

13:48

got excited by this, and even monarchs, popes,

13:50

and so on, all wanted to belong. So

13:53

you have this kind of quality where this

13:56

learning seems to have attracted people

13:58

to it. And it was not

14:00

the regular church learning. It was something else

14:03

really a kind of ethical model

14:05

of living and a certain style that people

14:07

picked up from the ancients, really from ancient

14:09

Rome. And so

14:11

this began to form groups of people.

14:14

And these friends were friends

14:17

in England. They were friends of people he

14:19

met, scholars. So when he went to England

14:21

the first time, Moore and

14:23

John Collett was another one who he

14:26

was extremely close to and

14:28

who also went into debates with him,

14:30

biblical subjects. So their communication with each

14:32

other and the kind of model of

14:34

learning and exchange that went on, that

14:36

became a model for people. And

14:39

then it spread wider. And in Rasmus' case, several

14:41

visits to England and then he ended up teaching

14:43

at Cambridge in 1511 to 1514. He

14:48

really got to know a lot of people

14:50

that way. And letters were exchanged, ideas, things

14:52

like that. And then you get this kind

14:54

of jokey kind of thing, lovely letters about

14:56

gifts from people and exchanges

14:58

and so on. There's a wonderful exchange

15:01

that he and a friend, an Italian

15:03

who lived in London, Ammonio, and he

15:05

got together and they were both doing

15:07

each other how much they could praise

15:10

each other over these exchanges of kegs

15:12

of wine that Ammonio was sending them

15:14

and compliments they could give each other.

15:16

So there's this whole mutual admiration society

15:18

that got going. It really spread until

15:21

finally there were people in Poland who

15:23

were participating, people in Italy, people in

15:25

Spain, France, England, in the

15:27

Netherlands, low countries, I guess you'd call it.

15:29

So you had all of these people interchanging

15:32

letters and Rasmus was the center of a

15:34

lot of this. In France,

15:36

writer Guillaume Boudet, who we got

15:38

into correspondence with, extremely learned it,

15:40

a Greek scholar who preferred

15:42

to write what he could, his letters

15:44

in Greek rather than just ordinary Latin.

15:47

They would get in this weird relationship

15:49

where they would be complementing each other

15:52

and meanwhile correcting each other's prose or

15:55

indicating scholarly errors that they'd made so

15:57

it was like a privilege almost to

15:59

be corrected. each other. So it's an

16:01

odd kind of thing but it still exists

16:03

I think in some scholarly communities and go

16:05

to a conference and people will compliment

16:07

you at the same time they're correcting you and

16:10

then you're supposed to be so happy to be

16:12

corrected by that kind of thing. Yes,

16:14

this is one for the academics listening, that

16:16

moment where someone says, it's more

16:18

of a comment really. Anyway, so

16:21

after his first visit to England,

16:23

it's striking that he gets robbed

16:25

as he sees it at the

16:27

border and necessity becomes the

16:29

sort of mother of invention. Poverty breeds

16:32

creativity, he really starts to write. And

16:35

what I was struck by is reading

16:37

your work which puts it chronologically as

16:39

just the variety of what he's turning

16:42

his mind to as he starts out

16:44

to write, whether it's thinking about Proverbs

16:46

or Cicero or the

16:48

handbook of a Christian soldier. I

16:51

think when he was in England he realised,

16:53

I'm a person of interest. I don't think

16:55

he knew that before. He was striving to

16:57

be one but suddenly he was in a

16:59

community that had already formed, it was small

17:01

but they had the Littaker who was a

17:03

Greek scholar who studied under Poliziano in Italy

17:05

and William Grosven and others and

17:07

they had Collett and Moore and

17:10

these people were all part of a level

17:12

of society, this kind of bureaucratic culture that

17:14

we're in the courts now and in

17:16

the churches. They were excited

17:18

by classical learning and

17:20

I think that he had already done a

17:22

lot of his training stuff with these students

17:24

so he'd written all these little textbooks I

17:26

guess you'd say, just little trials of textbooks

17:28

and then he began to write them. Someone

17:30

found one of these textbooks he did when

17:32

he was a tutor in Paris and published

17:34

it without his permission. So then he had

17:36

to rewrite it to make it better and

17:38

there's this kind of thing that was going

17:40

on and there was no copyright whatsoever. Outside

17:42

of the Holy Roman Empire might have a

17:44

certain kind of copyright or so but basically

17:46

it was pretty loose and so people were

17:48

just publishing his stuff all over

17:51

the place after a while. But in

17:53

the early books he really focused in

17:55

on the things that he knew about

17:57

which was a Christian life which he

18:00

had been through in the monasteries. and

18:02

then his own discovery of literary style

18:04

and his need to teach it. So

18:06

learning about proverbs and putting these little

18:08

gems in your writing were an essential

18:11

part of what he was trying to

18:13

do. But now he was

18:15

doing it not in a classroom, but in

18:17

a public sphere. And I think that's

18:19

the big thing that he discovered is

18:21

that he could actually succeed by being more public

18:24

and not trying to do things as privately as

18:26

he'd been doing it before. And it was the

18:28

printing press that allowed him to do that. And

18:30

the other thing that you suggested is a

18:32

kind of turn, a moment of change for

18:35

him, is his trip through

18:37

the Alps to Italy. Is this

18:39

the moment where he really starts to make his name? He

18:41

definitely is going through a bit of

18:44

a midlife crisis when he's heading down. That was 1509 and

18:47

he was very aware that he hadn't

18:49

reached his potential. It was

18:51

almost 40, but it was a career crisis

18:53

for him. And I think

18:55

that he was still a tutor. He was

18:57

taking these two boys to Italy who were

19:00

of Italian background, but they needed to see

19:02

the homeland. And then he stayed in various

19:04

locations and then he realized that he was

19:06

now, when he met all these Italian scholars,

19:09

he was actually operating at the same level

19:11

they were. And it really

19:13

showed when he ended up in

19:15

Venice working with the publisher Aldus

19:17

Minutius in Venice and worked

19:20

on his adages there. And I think at that

19:22

stage, he knew he was on a roll and

19:25

he was moving and people there could

19:27

see it. He could sense

19:29

it. And the work that emerged was the

19:31

one that really made his reputation, which is

19:33

the book of adages, because he took the

19:36

little books that he published sometime earlier and

19:39

expanded into a full-size telephone book

19:41

style collection of adages, which was

19:43

quite massive and which showed enormous

19:45

learning because basically he had read

19:48

everything in classical literature that he

19:50

could and looking for proverbs wherever

19:52

he could find them. And then

19:54

was able to weave these proverbs

19:56

into stories about how they came

19:59

into being. and how they were

20:01

used by early scholars. And then the special

20:03

treat is how to use them yourself. And

20:05

the special add-on was he showed you how

20:08

to do it by doing it himself. So

20:10

in the adages, there are many proverbs used

20:12

to describe other proverbs. That's

20:14

where his real skill as a writer

20:16

came out, is being able to adapt

20:18

these different genres to this kind of

20:20

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20:23

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22:56

to this is his most

22:58

radical world today to that

23:00

point. Fully what?

23:02

Was this and why was it such

23:04

a hit? Principal. He

23:07

started his own using little attempt

23:09

when he was leaving Italy. Fifty.

23:12

Nine He had been to England and

23:14

he was coming back to the hopes

23:16

and it was on horseback and he

23:19

says he had this idea was so

23:21

he says of writing this amusing. Jump.

23:24

Ruined extended joke for his friend to

23:27

was more who enjoyed jokes. and this

23:29

is going to be Speech in praise

23:31

of Bali and is based on an

23:33

earlier classical form. There are people in

23:35

Britain. Things on brazen baldness in the

23:38

breeze of flies in the breeze of

23:40

these upside down praises praises where you

23:42

wouldn't expect to see them and fall

23:44

was the second to an extreme and

23:47

in his book he really showed his

23:49

satirical side that he hadn't shown before.

23:51

And writing in there he begins to

23:53

make. his social commentary on things

23:56

that he sees around him

23:58

and comments on greedy monks

24:00

and prelates and war-like leaders who basically

24:02

aren't paying any attention to their people

24:04

at all, and then people

24:07

who have terrible social behavior and

24:09

so on. And it turns out

24:11

there are a lot of fools out there. And

24:13

then it gets turned inward

24:16

into, let's look more carefully at this idea

24:18

of fool and the way it's used, for

24:20

instance, in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes or in

24:22

St. Paul. And St. Paul refers to himself

24:25

as a fool in places. And so what does

24:28

that mean? And it may mean the most foolish

24:30

thing you can be to a foolish person is

24:33

a Christian, a truly proper behaving

24:35

Christian. And this would

24:37

work quite well for us now in our

24:39

secular era because anyone who is like a

24:41

real believer in religion or something you've seen

24:43

is slightly crazed or slightly not all there.

24:46

And yet his argument is, in a sense, they

24:48

aren't because they have moved outside the normal

24:51

social mode of how to behave.

24:53

And the normal social mold is

24:55

actually foolishness. And so

24:57

it's kind of a double thing that's happening

25:00

by the end. It gets quite complicated at

25:02

the end. And so everyone is foolish, everyone.

25:05

And it's an argument that it's hard to talk your

25:07

way out of. And Folly, who

25:09

is a female character in the thing, is

25:12

freely naming everyone insight to be

25:14

a fool. And the book,

25:16

I think Erasmus, by the end, it almost

25:19

turned into a kind of meditation

25:21

on the nature of being Christian and all

25:24

that. And I think it went further than

25:26

Erasmus had planned. And I do

25:28

believe it was one of those books that people now

25:30

and then write, they didn't know that they had it

25:32

in them to write it. And

25:35

this is what came out. And later on,

25:37

I don't think he considered it to be one of his

25:39

best books, but everyone else did.

25:42

It's a hard book for modern readers to read at

25:44

the beginning. But once you get the hang of it,

25:46

it's pretty good. It's good to read it with notes

25:48

at the bottom because all that learning that he'd taken

25:50

in Italy, all the adages that he learned are just

25:52

poured into this book. So

25:55

it was also a scene to be as

25:57

extremely learned by people and therefore

25:59

some something of real interest. So

26:02

I'm getting a sense that there was

26:04

a kind of delight among scholars at

26:06

the time in spotting oh that's good

26:08

you've used that from oh Virgil

26:11

there and oh you all that bit from Cicero

26:13

there you know there's the kind of sense of

26:15

enjoying recognising the inclusions and thinking

26:17

of that as claveness but there's

26:19

a kind of inversion going on

26:22

here which is where he's doing

26:24

something frightfully clever and full

26:26

of classical illusion and demonstrating all this

26:28

learning but actually he's talking about the

26:30

value of being a fool and

26:33

perhaps it's that paradoxical nature that makes

26:35

it so appealing. It is

26:37

as paradoxical as one could achieve I think

26:39

in taking on something like that. It was

26:42

published with one of the early editions with

26:44

the Imphrase of Baldness is on tossed in

26:46

addition of that and by Saines Césius I

26:48

think his name was and so it's popped

26:51

into there and other of these false

26:53

praises it was a kind of a jokey

26:55

thing but it's that learning

26:57

that really mattered and that people were

27:00

super responsive to and the way he

27:02

was able to use his own learning

27:04

in the work too and he refers to

27:06

it himself he said if you want more he ended

27:09

up writing footnotes to it and provided

27:11

an index to it in case you

27:13

needed that also so as it went

27:15

through subsequent publications you have this commentary

27:17

written by a younger scholar but

27:19

mostly by Erasmus actually and

27:21

it tells you oh for this you should

27:24

read Erasmus's adages it turns in on itself

27:26

and feeds off itself the whole project. You've

27:29

mentioned already his New Testament which

27:31

is a few years later 1516 if the

27:33

praise of

27:36

follow has been universally sort of acclaimed

27:38

how controversial was his New

27:41

Testament? Oh I think

27:43

pretty controversial. It

27:48

was not a project that was a

27:50

novelty because in Spain scholars were already

27:52

working on a massive multi-lingual

27:55

version of the Bible the Confuetentian

27:57

polyglot it's called and it was

27:59

a going to be a Bible

28:01

with different languages set side by

28:03

side, like an expanded, low translation

28:06

something. We have all the

28:08

languages now and different versions, but he

28:10

got started on this and what really

28:12

got him moving was he's always been

28:14

interested in what to do with the

28:16

Bible and how to approach it, but

28:18

he really had trained himself now as a

28:21

philological scholar. He was interested in words,

28:23

where they came from, what's appropriate at

28:25

a certain place and time, what were

28:27

the actual meanings of things. And

28:29

he came across the work of a

28:32

scholar named Lorenzo Vala, who he'd already

28:34

known for his work on Latin style.

28:36

And Vala had done a really close

28:39

analysis of the standard Vulgate Bible that

28:41

was being circulated at the time and

28:43

pointed out many mis-translations between

28:46

the Greek version of the Bible and

28:48

of the New Testament and the extant

28:50

Latin version. And that got

28:52

Erasmus Ferry heated up over this particular

28:54

project. And so he was able to

28:56

go back, look at the Bible and

28:59

the way the language has been translated

29:01

and then do his own translation. And

29:03

that is a step too

29:05

far for his people around

29:07

him in the church and so on. It

29:09

was seen as being verging on heretical. When

29:12

you get people translating Bible, people do get

29:14

upset and they prefer to go back to

29:16

the one they know. It had

29:18

a lot of problems. And also when the

29:21

first edition came out, it had many errors

29:23

in it because Erasmus was an

29:25

extremely fast worker. And I think

29:27

he figured already by then that

29:30

you can publish something, but there's a great

29:32

thing. You can republish it. And so the

29:35

Bible went through five editions. The

29:37

commentary kept getting expanded on it. And

29:40

in the commentary, he was then able to

29:42

write against the critics of his Bible and

29:44

who would maybe criticize something he said. And then

29:47

he would go in a footnote

29:49

to the commentary, his annotations to the

29:51

Bible and slam

29:53

the critic who had attacked

29:55

him. And so it

29:57

actually makes for quite interesting reading a biblical.

30:00

commentary because it's a

30:02

bit like reading Freud. A lot

30:04

of Freud's writings are really attacks

30:06

on his attackers and Erasmus

30:08

is doing that in his work too. So it

30:10

made for a dynamic

30:12

reading experience. It

30:15

was a live issue that you were looking at.

30:17

It was something that was meaningful and that was

30:20

being fought over. And so people would look

30:22

at this and they would have to make up their own minds

30:24

too if they were reading it. This

30:26

Bible project, that combined with

30:28

praise of folly, which is seen as being

30:30

heretical in its own way, really

30:32

got him to be a figure

30:35

of great annoyance to scholars and

30:37

theologians in different places, Paris especially,

30:39

and in places in Spain and

30:41

so on. And then it's

30:44

really just after this period that you

30:46

begin to have his many critics just

30:48

coming after him. I tried

30:50

to explain that in the book because there is

30:52

a kind of theory that a sociologist sets up

30:54

which is there's only so much room at the

30:56

top. And when you

30:59

have a period of controversy as

31:01

it soon became in 1517 with Luther, a

31:03

highly controversial

31:06

period, there would be a necessity

31:08

for someone to be standing

31:11

out in front to take the discussion, to

31:13

lead the discussion and so on. And Erasmus

31:15

is one of those people or became the

31:17

person really for quite a period of time.

31:19

I think towards the end of his life

31:21

people dropped away from him a bit. He

31:23

was too complicated for them by the end.

31:26

But with the Bible and all these many

31:28

classical things that he'd been doing, it

31:30

really had attracted quite an interest in

31:33

him and following. So

31:35

you mentioned that this is a period where

31:37

there's many critics and there are debates over

31:39

all sorts of things. But perhaps the most

31:42

important is Martin Luther you've just mentioned. And

31:44

you know at the outset there's a glance

31:46

you'd think they'd have so much in common.

31:48

I know they never met but you'd think

31:51

well they both cared about reform. They're

31:53

both quite earthy and a bit concerned

31:55

with bodily functions and they're

31:58

both interested in new reading. of

32:00

Scripture. So why in

32:02

the end do they not see eye to

32:04

eye? There was two

32:06

things happening I think for Erasmus.

32:09

One was the environment around Luther

32:11

or of the whole religious debate

32:13

and his feeling forced into a

32:17

head-on debate with Luther because two things were

32:19

happening with that. First of all it was

32:21

not just Luther but it was the whole

32:24

humanist project which was under

32:26

scrutiny now by theologians and so

32:28

on because they saw Luther as

32:30

being more of a humanist than

32:32

a regular Catholic even though he

32:34

was highly trained in scholastic philosophy

32:37

and people were taking sides and

32:39

everyone on the humanist side was

32:41

urging Erasmus to fight

32:44

with Luther because Luther was seen

32:46

to attract the hatred of this

32:48

anti-humanist crowd of theologians and so

32:51

he was pulled into it. Initially

32:53

he didn't really want to do that. He actually

32:55

admired aspects of Luther but he felt Luther was

32:57

pushing it too hard and Luther

32:59

I think also changed a lot from 1517 up into

33:01

the 1520s and 1520 he was

33:06

excommunicated. So during this short period

33:08

Luther I don't think even knew

33:10

what he had started until

33:13

it got out of control and he

33:15

was being forced into looking

33:18

at his own position and clarifying it

33:20

further and further and finally

33:22

really to the point of a

33:24

break with the church and I don't

33:26

think he necessarily intended that at

33:28

the beginning and Erasmus was

33:30

with him along that road for quite a

33:32

while and then suddenly realized this has gone

33:35

too far and the curious

33:37

thing about the book that Erasmus

33:39

wrote the Diatribe about free

33:41

will is that he really latched on to

33:43

the one thing that Luther

33:46

had not really foregrounded but

33:49

in discussion with Erasmus that turned out

33:51

that was actually the make-or-break issue. It

33:53

wasn't corruption in the church or church

33:55

indulgences or hatred of the humanist study

33:58

and all that kind of stuff. It

34:00

was really something to do that was

34:02

an essential thing in what Luther was

34:04

on about. And that is the

34:06

denial of free will and agency

34:09

in your moral life, really. And

34:12

Erasmus tried to explain his position on

34:14

that, and Luther was having none of

34:16

it. Luther had a very extreme position.

34:18

Erasmus just couldn't go down that road,

34:20

but they had a lot in common

34:22

up until the real break came. I

34:25

wonder if another sort of

34:28

point of controversy was that

34:30

Erasmus couldn't accept the principle

34:32

that only Scripture is the source of

34:35

authority, in part because he could

34:37

see how flawed translations

34:39

of it could be. That's a very

34:42

good observation. Erasmus was very aware

34:44

of the tradition of interpretation and

34:46

could see that anyone who locked

34:48

into something was going into a

34:51

world that was already extremely controversial,

34:53

right from the very earliest days

34:55

of the church. And

34:57

he had been editing a lot of these

34:59

texts now, the early church fathers, doctors, and

35:01

so on. Really, he could

35:03

see how difficult it was to reach

35:05

some kind of an agreement or consensus.

35:08

But he felt that in the church, as a community

35:10

of friends, you could say, there

35:13

should be some form of consensus in there. And

35:15

he could not find that consensus with

35:17

Luther. And that consensus came of a

35:20

long tradition of reading, thinking,

35:22

meditating on Scripture, and so on.

35:25

And Luther had broken from that. And

35:27

also, the other thing is, Luther was supposed to

35:30

be a friend. That's how they

35:32

initially approached each other and the possibility

35:34

of some kind of friendship. It was

35:36

an extremely unfriendly exchange that had occurred.

35:39

And that notion of the community and

35:41

of the consensus of the

35:43

Republic of Letters, people joining

35:45

together to create, overall, a

35:48

better civic society. He could see

35:50

that was collapsing with Luther. And Luther

35:52

could see that he could not

35:54

belong to this group or

35:57

to this idea of a group, I guess, would be

35:59

more accurate. When we look at

36:01

Erasmus, there's actually much that

36:03

is familiar in terms of

36:06

fame today. He's famous in part because

36:08

he seeks fame, like he's on social

36:10

media or something. He does have the

36:13

media of the time, which is print

36:15

that he is using so effectively. And

36:18

you quote Andrew Pettigrew saying that he was

36:20

a coolly commercial intellectual and one has to

36:22

admit if you're going to publish and

36:25

republish so people have got to get your later editions.

36:28

That is pretty savvy. What

36:30

do you think we should learn from him?

36:33

I am quite drawn to his message. I'm

36:35

not sure if I'm at the end of

36:38

the humanist or you to hear yourself at

36:40

the end of a humanist tradition or not

36:42

because things have changed a lot in the

36:44

academic world and in the idea of the

36:46

canon of literature and all that. It's undergoing

36:49

a tremendous changes in our own time. And

36:52

to look back at Erasmus' time, which is

36:54

also full of surprises and

36:56

changes there, that he had set

36:58

on a path that I felt

37:00

really regulated a lot of education

37:02

in times after. So it

37:04

really in England, it could be seen

37:06

in St. Paul's school, 1509. John

37:09

called it rewrote the rules for the school

37:12

and changed the curriculum and had a huge

37:14

impact in England. And really the whole education

37:17

of England up in the time of

37:19

Shakespeare and so on, Marlowe, and they're

37:21

all reasonably well educated, even though

37:23

Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek, he

37:25

was expected to have some of them. And

37:28

he was writing in part for a learned

37:30

audience as well as for the more popular

37:32

audience. And we have kept that

37:34

in the education system for many

37:36

centuries really. And people, Boris Johnson

37:38

recited in large twaths of the

37:40

Iliad, it's on a video somewhere.

37:42

And I went, wow, that would

37:44

have been a good party trick

37:46

in Erasmus' time, not ours. So

37:49

that was retained in the school system and

37:51

all that. And now I

37:53

think we see a shift away from

37:55

certainly historical studies, classical literature and so

37:58

on, and it's other things are happening. happened.

38:00

And so my takeaway from this

38:02

is that if we do that,

38:04

we're losing something. And that is

38:06

the thing that Erasmus really has,

38:08

this personal sense of showing oneself

38:10

in one's own writing, the interiority

38:13

of each individual as a response

38:15

to that interior reaction we have,

38:18

which makes us each an individual

38:20

as readers. Each reader is

38:22

different from each other reader. That's why we get

38:24

so many debates about what something actually means. And

38:27

he encourages that. And he

38:29

also encourages a discussion that goes

38:31

around that. And that the ideas

38:33

can come into discussion and play.

38:35

And at the same time, that

38:38

serves to support the project of

38:40

a kind of civic society. So

38:42

we're in something that's sort of putting that a

38:44

little bit under stress right now. So

38:46

I'm not sure if I look back to

38:48

him as an exemplar of something that was

38:50

great, or maybe that's something that should be

38:52

great ahead of us. Well,

38:55

thank you very much for a brief

38:57

introduction to this great figure,

39:00

Erasmus. But I do

39:02

heartily recommend to listeners

39:04

this lovely little book, Erasmus of

39:06

Rotterdam, The Spirit of a Scholar. Professor

39:09

Belkert, thank you so much for your time.

39:11

And thank you very much. I enjoyed that.

39:43

So you get each new episode as soon as it's

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