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Updated: May 8, 2025
The work gradually grew into the most voluminous of Erasmus's original writings: a forest of a work, operis sylvam, he calls it himself. In four books he treated his subject, the art of preaching well and decorously, with an inexhaustible abundance of examples, illustrations, schemes, etc.
In our study we have noted: the Revival of Learning, what it was, and the significance of the terms Humanism and Renaissance; three influential literary works, Erasmus's Praise of Folly, More's Utopia, and Tyndale's translation of the New Testament; Wyatt and Surrey, and the so-called courtly makers or poets; Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a collection of the Arthurian legends in English prose.
We may conjecture, also, that the books left by his father, possibly brought by him from Italy, contributed to Erasmus's culture, though it would be strange that, prone as he was to disparage his schools and his monastery, he should not have mentioned the fact.
Erasmus's first stay in England, which lasted from the early summer of 1499 till the beginning of 1500, was to become for him a period of inward ripening. He came there as an erudite poet, the protégé of a nobleman of rank, on the road to closer contact with the great world which knew how to appreciate and reward literary merit.
Erasmus's modesty and the contempt which he displays of the fame that fell to his lot are of a somewhat rhetorical character. But in this we should not so much see a personal trait of Erasmus as a general form common to all humanists. On the other hand, this mood cannot be called altogether artificial. His books, which he calls his children, have not turned out well.
Some remarkable evidence regarding Erasmus's altered attitude towards the old and the new Church is shown by what follows. The reproach he had formerly so often flung at the advocates of conservatism that they hated the bonae literae, so dear to him, and wanted to stifle them, he now uses against the evangelical party. 'Wherever Lutherism is dominant the study of literature is extinguished.
Erasmus has afterwards defended himself explicitly from that suspicion and carefully noted how many of those whom he honoured with a dedication gave nothing or very little. The first need, therefore, to a man in Erasmus's circumstances was to find a Maecenas. Maecenas with the humanists was almost synonymous with paymaster.
Their cleanliness is praised by everybody. Nowhere are such large numbers of moderately learned persons found, though extraordinary and exquisite erudition is rather rare. They were Erasmus's own most cherished ideals which he here ascribes to his compatriots gentleness, sincerity, simplicity, purity. He sounds that note of love for Holland on other occasions.
I confess that, though myself no less ardent as a Protestant than as an admirer of Holbein, I cannot, for the life of me, see any justification for either the claim or its implied charge of timorousness. Erasmus's Praise of Folly like so many a paradox started as a joke, had no notion of being serious at all until it was seriously attacked.
However this may be, Erasmus's strength was not in these political declamations. He could never be a leader of men with their passions and their harsh interests. His life-work lay elsewhere.
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