Erasmus

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and work of the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. In his lifetime Erasmus was almost universally recognised as the greatest classical scholar of his age, the translator and editor of numerous Latin and Greek texts. But above all he was a religious scholar who published important editions of the Bible which expunged many corruptions to the texts of the Scriptures. He was an outspoken critic of the Church, whose biting satire on its excesses, In Praise of Folly, was famed throughout Europe.When the Reformation began in 1517, however, Erasmus chose to remain a member of the Catholic Church rather than side with Martin Luther and the reformers, and a few years later he engaged in a celebrated debate with Luther on the subject of free will. Through his writings on the Church, on education and the wide gamut of humanist scholarship, Erasmus is remembered today as one of the greatest thinkers of the northern Renaissance.With:Diarmaid MacCullochProfessor of the History of the Church at the University of OxfordEamon DuffyProfessor of the History of Christianity at the University of CambridgeJill KrayeProfessor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our
0:04.3	terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.1	Hello, one of Hans Holbein's best known paintings is a portrait of a middle-aged man dressed
0:16.7	in a luxurious fur coat. He sits at a table, gazing serenely into the middle distance,
0:22.2	his hands resting on a book. This scholarly figure is Desiderius Erasmus, one of the most
0:27.8	celebrated intellectuals of the sixteenth in the need of any century. Dutch Biber, 1467,
0:33.7	Erasmus lived and worked all over Europe. It was a brilliant classical scholar,
0:38.9	a theologian, and a translator of the Bible. He wrote satires, works of educational theory,
0:44.0	and devastating attacks on those who sought to bring down the Catholic Church. During the early
0:48.9	exchanges of the Protestant Reformation he was involved, then inflamed and celebrated dispute
0:53.8	with Martin Luther. He is one of the most widely bred writers of his age, a thinker of lasting
0:59.1	influence. We'll be to discuss his life and work of Erasmus, our Dermin McCulloch,
1:03.6	professor of the history of the Church at the University of Oxford, Amin Duffy, professor
1:08.6	of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and Jill Kray, professor of the history
1:13.6	of Renaissance philosophy, and librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London.
1:18.4	Dermin McCulloch, can you give us some background on Erasmus? What do you know about his early life
1:23.1	and education? Well, he's always called it Erasmus of Rotterdam, and he made this sort of spin
1:29.4	doctrine title for himself. We don't actually know where he was born. It might have been the town
1:34.0	of Rotterdam. It might have been another town called Hauder, and that's interesting because
1:39.4	actually Erasmus didn't want us to know much about his early life, and that's because he was the
1:45.3	son of a priest. In other words, in the terms of 15th century Western Europe, he was a non-person.
1:52.4	He shouldn't have sons of priests at the time, and I think there's a sense in which he is a man
	...

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