Erasmus: Intellectual of the 16th Century

ISBN-13: 9783030798598 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 116 str.

Nathan Ron

Spis treści

I. Introduction: Prefiguring the Modern Intellectual?

II.  The Public Good

III. Intellectual Against Crusading 

IV. In Face of the Execution of Thomas More

V. In Face of Francis I’s Foreign policy 

VI. In Face of the Destruction of the Indians

VII Cosmopolitan Intellectual?

VIII. Conclusion: Only Sparks Fly Upward

O autorze

Nathan Ron is Research Fellow at the School of History, The University of Haifa, Israel.

Blurb

This book is a sequel to Nathan Ron's Erasmus and the “Other.” Should we consider Erasmus an involved or public intellectual alongside figures such as Machiavelli, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu? Was Erasmus really an independent intellectual? In Ron's estimation, Erasmus did not fully live up to his professed principles of Christian peace. Despite the anti-war preaching so eminent in his writings, he made no stand against the warlike and expansionist foreign policies of specific European kings of his era, and even praised the glory won by Francis I on the battlefield of Marignano (1515). Furthermore, in the face of Henry VIII’s execution of his beloved Thomas More and John Fisher, and the atrocities committed by the Spanish against indigenous peoples in the New World, Erasmus preferred self-censorship to expressions of protest or criticism and did not step forward to reproach kings of their misdeeds or crimes. 

Nathan Ron is Research Fellow at the School of History, The University of Haifa, Israel.