Among the most important of Erasmus' contributions to Christian humanism were his Greek text, new Latin translation, and annotations of the New Testament, an implicit challenge to the authority of the Vulgate and one that provoked numerous responses. This volume of the Collected Works contains translations of four of Erasmus' responses to his critics, written between 1520 and 1532 and directed primarily to his Franciscan and Dominican contemporaries at the university in Louvain. Three are connected to his Annotations on the New Testament. The fourth, a letter to Christopher von...

Erasmus yearned to make the New Testament an effective instrument of reform in society, church, and everyday life, and to this end he composed the Paraphrases, in which the words of Holy Scripture provide the core of a text that was vastly expanded to embrace the reforming "philosophy of Christ." Paraphrase on Luke 1-10 contains the first half of Erasmus's Paraphrase on Luke - the second half of which appeared in this series in 2003 - and completes the set of translations of the Paraphrases into English.

In his Paraphrase on...

Many of the letters in this volume, which covers the period August 1530 to March 1531, reflect Erasmus' anxieties over events at the Diet of Augsburg (June-November 1530), at which the first of many attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement of the religious division in Germany came to a rancorous conclusion, thus fostering the fear that religious controversy would eventually lead to war. His other chief concerns were the continued attacks on him by Catholic critics who regarded him as a clandestine Lutheran, and the insistence of many evangelical reformers that he was their spiritual...

After spending several months in England, Erasmus returned to Paris in the winter of 1500 and set about compiling a small anthology of classical proverbs known as the Adagiorum collectanea. This modest work became the basis for one of Erasmus' best known and longest works, when it was expanded in 1508 into the far more substantial Adagiorum chiliades.　The essay that begins this introductory volume to the Adages explores the development of the Collectanea and its transformation into the Adagiorum chiliades. It is followed by the first annotated...

Volume 58 in the Collected Works of Erasmus series contains, for the first time, the English translation of Erasmus' Annotations on Paul's Epistles to the Galatians and Ephesians.

Erasmus' Annotations began as marginal comments in his own copy of the New Testament and were subsequently published in 1516 as a supplement to the Novum Instrumentum. His annotations were intended to justify his changes based on the Greek text. In each successive edition, published between 1516 and 1535, the Annotations grew in size and scope providing Erasmus with the...

Volume 18 in the Collected Works of Erasmus series covers the period from 1 April 1531 to 30 March 1532. The most persistent theme in the letters is the fear, to which Erasmus had long been prey, that the religious strife in Germany and Switzerland would eventually lead to armed conflict.

His Catholic and Evangelical critics continued to annoy him. In June 1531 Erasmus published his final apologia against Alberto Pio, who had accused him of being the source of the Lutheran heresy. Though Erasmus' public controversy with the Strasbourg theologians had come to an end in 1530, he...

This volume contains the surviving correspondence of Erasmus for the first seven months of 1529. For nearly eight years he had lived happily and productively in Basel. In the winter of 1528-9, however, the Swiss version of the Lutheran Reformation triumphed in the city, destroying the liberal-reformist atmosphere Erasmus had found so congenial. Unwilling to live in a place where Catholic doctrine and practice were officially proscribed, Erasmus resettled in the quiet, reliably Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau,

Despite the turmoil of moving, Erasmus managed to...