Erasmus of Rotterdam: The Spirit of a Scholar

Description

Erasmus of Rotterdam came from an obscure background and through remarkable perseverance, skill, and vision became a powerful intellectual figure in Europe in the early sixteenth century. He was known for his vigorous opposition to war, intolerance and hypocrisy, and at the same time for an irony and subtlety that could confuse his friends as well as his opponents. His ideas influenced the rise of the Reformation and had a huge impact on the humanities, and that continues to today. This book shows how an independent textual scholar was able, by the power of the printing press and his own wits, to attain both fame and notoriety. Erasmus of Rotterdam is the first popular biography in English in thirty years and is based on the immense amount of recent scholarship devoted to Erasmus.

William Barker is Inglis Professor and former president of the University of King's College and Emeritus Professor of English, Dalhousie University. He has edited a selection of Erasmus' Adages and co-edited the introductory volume of the Adages for the Toronto Collected Works of Erasmus.

"This book is a gem. It follows Erasmus, the great Renaissance humanist, through a life full of travel, comity, controversy, and scholarship. Barker offers expert distillations of Erasmus's wide-ranging works and a judicious selection of examples, references, and images. We learn about the many ingredients of Erasmus's success as a scholar, including his personality traits and intellectual commitments, and his patrons, friends, and helpers." -- Ann Blair, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, Harvard University "An engaging and very readable popular biography, at times amusing, with insights into the relation of the humanities in Erasmus's time to our own." -- Erika Rummel, University of Toronto