The first printing press was invented in Germany in roughly 1439. Six decades later, a Dutch priest named Erasmus (c. 1469–1536) invented the bestseller.
Erasmus, a theologian, philosopher, and polymath, was one of the most widely read thinkers of the sixteenth century, as well as the first writer to gain a wide readership because of the new invention. He wrote in Latin on matters ranging from church politics to war. At one point, about 10 percent of all books sold in Europe were reputedly written by the prolific author.
Born in the port city of Rotterdam, Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a Catholic priest. He attended religious schools and was ordained a priest himself at age twenty-four, primarily to escape poverty.
Erasmus’s true love, however, was scholarship, and he spent most of the 1490s travelling to the intellectual centers of France, England, and Italy, where he learned Greek and studied theology. He began his first major literary project, a new translation of the Old Testament from Greek to Latin, in the early 1500s. The Praise of Folly, his best-known nonacademic text, was published in 1511. Erasmus also published numerous editions of his popular Adagia, a compilation of adages that included famous phrases and proverbs like “Leave no stone unturned” and “God helps those who help themselves.”
In church affairs, Erasmus was bothered by corruption in the Roman Catholic hierarchy and urged reform. But unlike Martin Luther (1483–1546), he never abandoned Catholicism, and attempted instead to steer a middle course between the traditionalists and the Protestant reformers.
Erasmus has been labeled the Prince of the Humanists in recognition of his pivotal place in European intellectual history. He symbolized the dawn of a new era, when books became far more widely available across the continent, breaking the monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church on higher learning.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Although universally known by his adopted academic name of Erasmus, the writer was born under the Dutch name Gerrit Gerritszoon.
- One of Erasmus’s friends at Oxford was Thomas More (c. 1477–1535), who would later be executed by another of the philosopher’s friends, King Henry VIII (1491–1547). More had enraged the king by refusing to take an oath disavowing the pope. Considered a Roman Catholic martyr, More was canonized in 1935.
- By refusing to take sides, Erasmus was at times distrusted by both sides of the religious schism of the 1520s. All of his books were banned by the Roman Catholic Church in 1559, and Luther called his writings “poison.”
