Archive: Erasmus

Misha Glenny (0:00)

In the latest edition of In Our Time, my guests and I discussed the most famous work of Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, who was later executed for his opposition to Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Both More's humanism and his loyalty to the established church developed under the influence of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the leading voice of European humanism at the time of the Renaissance and Reformation.

So, I thought we should go back and find out more about Erasmus, his relationship with England and indeed Thomas More. But in this episode we also learn about his bitter clash with the leading light of the Reformation and the new Protestant faith, Martin Luther, the more surprising since initially the two seem to share similar concerns. I hope you enjoy this Archive episode.

Melvyn Bragg (0:54)

Hello, one of Hans Holbein's best known paintings is a portrait of a middle-aged man dressed in a luxurious fur coat. He sits at a table, gazing serenely into the middle distance, his hands resting on a book. This scholarlificer is Desiderius Erasmus, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the sixteenth in need of any century.

Dutch by birth, 1467, Erasmus lived and worked all over Europe. He was a brilliant classical scholar, a theologian and a translator of the Bible. He wrote satires, works of educational theory and devastating attacks on those who sought to bring down the Catholic Church.

During the early exchanges of the Protestant Reformation, he was involved in an inflamed and celebrated dispute with Martin Luther. He was one of the most widely read writers of his age, a thinker of lasting influence. With me to discuss his life and work of Erasmus are Dermot MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford, Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and Jill Kraye, Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London. Dermot MacCulloch, can you give us some background on Erasmus? What do you know about his early life and education?

Diarmaid MacCulloch (2:06)

Well, he's always called it Erasmus of Rotterdam, and he made this a sort of spin-doctoring title for himself. We don't actually know where he was born. It might have been the town of Rotterdam. It might have been another town called Chowder.

And that's interesting because actually Erasmus didn't want us to know much about his early life. And that's because he was the son of a priest. In other words, in the terms of 15th century Western Europe, he was a non-person. He shouldn't have sons of priests at the time. And I think there's a sense in which he is a man who needs to reinvent himself from nothing. He creates the person, Erasmus, of Rotterdam. And that's funny as well, because of Rotterdam, he was the citizen of Europe. He never really had a home. You get a sense of a rootless man, who is just a brain, a sort of free-floating brain.

And that's the key to his career.

Melvyn Bragg (3:04)

His father was a scribe, as I understand it. Did he influence, and he died when Erasmus was in his mid-15 or 16, that sort of age, did he influence his son?

Diarmaid MacCulloch (3:14)

Great silence on that.

And what's he going to do, this boy, with a career in which he has no status in the world? Well, the thing you do in those circumstances is to go into the church. So the family put him on the first rungs of a career in the church. And they sent him off to a local monastery, an Augustinian monastery, a place called Stein. And he hated it. Absolutely hated it. He was miserable. He fell in love with a fellow monk. He was very upset by that. A few passionate letters survived from Erasmus to this monk, Sabatius Roger.

And you can see the rest of the career is a sense running away from that first failed attempt of the family to launch him.

Melvyn Bragg (4:01)

We move forward to his interest in humanism. Can you briefly encapsulate what humanism meant at the time and how it drew Erasmus into its grip?

Diarmaid MacCulloch (4:11)

Well, what is humanism? I sometimes say to undergraduates that the best thing about humanism is it's the realization that there is more to life than the Middle Ages.

Suddenly people had this great flow of new manuscripts from the remote past, Greek and Latin manuscripts, accelerated because so much was coming in from the East, from the fall of Constantinople when it was captured by the Ottoman Turks. And all this is very exciting. It's not just that they were finding new works to entertain them, what they were finding were texts which could help them reorganize their lives in a way that the ancient world gave them models and changed the society around them. So humanism is not just playing around with texts.