Works of Erasmus


was the most popular, most printed and arguably most influential author of the early Sixteenth Century, read in all nations in the West and frequently translated. By the 1530s, the writings of Erasmus accounted for 10 to 20 percent of all book sales in Europe. "Undoubtedly he was the most read author of his age."
His vast number of Latin and Greek publications included translations, paraphrases, letters, textbooks, plays for schoolboys, commentary, poems, liturgies, satires, sermons, and prayers. He is noted for his extensive scholarly editions of the New Testament and the complete works of numerous Church Fathers. A large number of his later works were defences of his earlier work from attacks by Catholic and Protestant theological and literary opponents.
His work was at the forefront of the contemporary Catholic Reformation and advocated a spiritual reform program he called the "philosophia Christi" and a theological reform agenda he called the Method of True Theology. It provided much of the material that spurred the Protestant Reformation, the Anglican Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; the influence of his ideas continues to the present.
Following the Council of Trent, which endorsed many of his themes, such as his theology on Free Will, many of his works were at times banned or required to be expurgated under various Catholic regional Indexes of prohibited books, and issued anonymously or bastardized with sectarian changes in Protestant countries. Many of his pioneering scholarly editions were superseded by newer revisions or re-brandings, and the popularity of his writings waned as pan-European Latin-using scholarship gave way to vernacular scholarship and readership.

Notable writings

Erasmus wrote for both educated audiences on subjects of humanist interest and "to Christians in the various stages of lives:...for the young, for married couples, for widows," the dying, clergy, theologians, religious, princes, partakers of sacraments, etc.
According to historial Erika Rummel "Three areas preoccupied Erasmus as a writer: language arts, education, and biblical studies....All of his works served as models of style....He pioneered the principles of textual criticism."
He usually wrote books in particular classical literary genres with their different rhetorical conventions: complaint, diatribe, dialogue, encomium, epistle, commentary, liturgy, sermon, etc. His letter to Ulrich von Hutten on Thomas More's household has been called "the first real biography in the real modern sense."
The only works with enduring popularity in modern time are his satires and semi-satires: The Praise of Folly, Julius Excluded from Heaven and The Complaint of Peace. However, his other works, such as his several thousand letters, continue to be a vital source of information to historians of numerous disciplines.

Adages (1500-1520)

Erasmus found early publishing success with his collections of sayings the Adagia and the Apophthegmata.
With the collaboration of Publio Fausto Andrelini, he made a collection of Latin proverbs and adages, commonly known as the Adagia. It includes the adage "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." He coined the adage "Pandora's box", arising through an error in his translation of Hesiod's Pandora in which he confused pithos with pyxis.
Examples of Adages are:
Erasmus is also blamed for the mistranslation from Greek of "to call a bowl a bowl" as "to call a spade a spade", and the rendering of Pandora's "jar" as "box".
Erasmus later spent nine months in Venice at the Aldine Press expanding the Adagia to over three thousand entries; in the course of 27 editions, it expanded to over four thousand entries in Basel at the Froben press. It "introduced a fairly wide audience to the actual words and thoughts of the ancients."
An English version was selected and translated by Richard Taverner.

Handbook of the Christian Knight (1501)

His more serious writings begin early with the Enchiridion militis Christiani, the "Handbook of the Christian Knight". In this short work, Erasmus outlines the views of the normal Christian life, which he was to spend the rest of his days elaborating.
He has been described as "evangelical in his beliefs and pietistic in his practise."

The Praise of Folly (1511)

Erasmus's best-known work is The Praise of Folly, written in 1509, published in 1511 under the double title Moriae encomium and Laus stultitiae. It is inspired by De triumpho stultitiae written by Italian humanist Faustino Perisauli. A satirical attack on superstitions and other traditions of European society in general and in the Western Church in particular, it was dedicated to Sir Thomas More, whose name the title puns.

''De copia'' (1512)

De Copia is a textbook designed to teach aspects of classical rhetoric: having a large supply of words, phrases and grammatical forms is a gateway to formulating and expressing thoughts, especially for "forensic oratory", with mastery and freshness. Perhaps as a joke, its full title is "The twofold
copia of words and arguments in a double commentary".
It was "the most often printed rhetoric textbook written in the renaissance, with 168 editions between 1512 and 1580."
The first part of the book is about verborum. It famously includes 147 variations on "Your letter
pleased me very much", and 203 bravura variations on "Always, as long as I live, I shall remember you."
The second part of the book is about rerum to learn critical thinking and advocacy. Erasmus advised students to practice the rhetorical techniques of copiousness by writing letters to each other arguing both side of an issue.

''Opuscula plutarchi'' (1514), and ''Apophthegmatum opus'' (1531)

In a similar vein to the Adages was his translation of Plutarch's Moralia: parts were published from 1512 onwards and collected as the Opuscula plutarchi.
This was the basis of 1531's Apophthegmatum opus, which ultimately contained over 3,000 aphophthegms: "certainly the fullest and most influential Renaissance collection of Cynic sayings and anecdotes", particular of Diogenes
One of these was published independently, as How to tell a Flatterer from a Friend, dedicated to England's Henry VIII.

''Julius exclusus e coelis'' (1514) attrib.

Julius excluded from Heaven is a biting satire usually attributed to Erasmus perhaps for private circulation, though he publicly denied writing it, calling its author a fool. The recently deceased Pope Julius arrives at the gates of heaven in his armour with his dead army, demanding from St Peter to be let in based on his glory and exploits. St Peter turns him away.

''Sileni Alcibiadis'' (1515)

Erasmus's Sileni Alcibiadis is one of his most direct assessments of the need for Church reform. It started as a small entry in the 1508 Adagia citing Plato's Symposium and expanded to several hundred sentences. Johann Froben published it first within a revised edition of the Adagia in 1515, then as a stand-alone work in 1517.
Sileni is the plural form of Silenus, a creature often related to the Roman wine god Bacchus and represented in pictorial art as inebriated, merry revellers, variously mounted on donkeys, singing, dancing, playing flutes, etc.
In particular, the Sileni that Erasmus referred to were small, coarse, hollow, ugly or distasteful carved figures which opened up to reveal a beautiful deity or valuables inside, in particular tiny gold statues of gods.
Alcibiades was a Greek politician in the 5th century BCE and a general in the Peloponnesian War; he figures here more as a character written into some of Plato's dialogues – an externally-attractive, young, debauched playboy whom Socrates tries to convince to seek truth instead of pleasure, wisdom instead of pomp and splendor.
The term Sileni – especially when juxtaposed with the character of Alcibiades – can therefore be understood as an evocation of the notion that something on the inside is more expressive of a person's character than what one sees on the outside. For instance, something or someone ugly on the outside can be beautiful on the inside, which is one of the main points of Plato's dialogues featuring Alcibiades and in the Symposium, in which Alcibiades also appears.
On the other hand, Erasmus lists several Sileni and then controversially questions whether Christ is the most noticeable Silenus of them all. The Apostles were Sileni since they were ridiculed by others. The scriptures are a Silenus too.
The work then launches into a biting endorsement of the need for high church officials to follow the evangelical counsel of poverty : this condemnation of wealth and power was a full two years before the notional start of the Reformation; the church must be able to act as a moderating influence on the ambition and selfishness of princes.

The Education of a Christian Prince (1516)

The Institutio principis Christiani or "Education of a Christian Prince" was written as advice to the young king Charles of Spain, to whom the Preface is addressed. Erasmus applies the general principles of honor and sincerity to the special functions of the Prince, whom he represents throughout as the servant of the people.

Latin and Greek New Testaments

Erasmus produced this first edition of his corrected Latin and Greek New Testament in 1516, in Basel at the print of Johann Froben, and took it through multiple revisions and editions. Up to 300,000 copies of the various editions appear to have been printed in Erasmus' lifetime. This body of work formed the basis for the majority of Textus Receptus translations of the New Testament in the 16th-19th centuries, including those of Martin Luther, William Tyndale and the King James Version.
For Erasmus, knowledge of the original language was not enough: theologian Gregory Graybill notes "the faithful exegete had to master not only the original tongues, but also the crucial disciplines of grammar and rhetoric." Consequently, an integral and motivating part of the work was the substantial philological annotations. Erasmus independently brought out Paraphrases of the books of the New Testament, suited for a less academic readership.
Erasmus had, for his time, relatively little interest in the Old Testament, apart from the Psalms. Similarly, he was relatively uninterested in the Book of Revelation, which he did not produce a paraphrase for, and he provocatively reported the doubts in the early Greek church about its status in the canon: Erasmus had none of the apocalypticism of his times which so animated Savonarolan and Protestant rhetoric: only one percent of his Annotations on the New Testament concerned the Book of Revelation.