In 1520, the reading public witnessed the eruption of a simmering conflict between Erasmus, the foremost advocate of the new biblical humanism, and Edward Lee, a younger scholar at the University of Louvain and spokesman for the traditionalists in matters of biblical interpretation and church discipline. When Erasmus (perhaps unconsciously) subsumed criticisms Lee had sent to him of his 1516 Annotations on the New Testament into the second edition (1519) without properly crediting their source, Lee resorted to publication of his collection of criticisms.

Erasmus responded immediately...

This fifth of seven volumes on the Adages continues from where the Collected Works of Erasmus volume 34 left off and includes 900 more adages from III iv 1 to IV ii 100. The aim of the Adages volumes in the CWE is to provide a fully annotated, accurate, and readable English version of the more than 4000 adages gathered, and commented on by Erasmus, sometimes in a few lines and sometimes in full-scale essays.

Following in the tradition of meticulous scholarship for which the Collected Works of Erasmus is widely known, the notes to this volume identify the classical sources and illustrate...

Spanning the period of 1523 to 1534, the compositions in Volume 78 of the Collected Works of Erasmus detail Erasmus' theological disagreements with the Swiss and Upper German 'evangelicals' and the German Lutherans, including Luther himself. While volumes 76 and 77 of the series focus on the controversy with Luther over the "freedom of the will," the wider lens of this volume also captures the conflicts between Erasmus and contemporaries such as Hutten, Eppendorf, Oecolampadius, Capito, and Bucer.

These writings reveal the dialogue between Erasmus and those evangelicals who...

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...