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Updated: June 11, 2025
There is a fine Latin letter of Petrarch's on this incompatibility between reverence and the presence of the person, and between fame and life. It comes second in his Epistolae familiares? and it is addressed to Thomas Messanensis. He there observes, amongst other things, that the learned men of his age all made it a rule to think little of a man's writings if they had even once seen him.
If the Brethren had seen Erasmus' final letter to Slechta, they might well have been encouraged to hope much from him. But of this there is no indication. Slechta was hardly likely to communicate it to them; and though such documents often leaked out against the owner's will, its first appearance in print was in 1521, in Erasmus' Epistolae ad diuersos.
The appearance of the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum in 1515 exposed the scholastic teachers and their allies in the Church to such widespread ridicule that it is not easy for us now to realize the position which those dignitaries still held when Erasmus was young.
His heart, he said, was so full of this matter that his tongue could not find utterance. Still, the bold satire with which his former college friend Crotus and other Humanists lashed their opponents and held them up to ridicule, as in the famous 'Epistolae Virorum Obscurorum, was not to Luther's taste at all. The matter was to him far too serious for such treatment.
"Tum jam nulla viro juranti faemina credat; Nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles; Qui, dum aliquid cupiens animus praegestit apisci, Nil metuunt jurare, nihil promittere parcunt: Sed simul ac cupidae mentis satiata libido est, Dicta nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant." An extraordinary turn upon the words is that in Ovid's "Epistolae Heroidum" of Sappho to Phaon:
If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to reduce it to words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make as sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the "Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds.
Their philosophy was founded on Aristotle; and while they were proud of their master, they were prouder still of the system they had created in his name: and thus they felt no impulse to look backwards to the past. Cf. F.G. Stokes, Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 1909, p. xvii. In the matter of language they had been led by a spirit of reaction.
Not to speak of his epistolary relations with Bude, with the Cardinal d'Armagnac and with Pellissier, the ambassador of Francis I. and Bishop of Maguelonne, or of his dedication to Tiraqueau of his Lyons edition of the Epistolae Medicinales of Giovanni Manardi of Ferrara, of the one addressed to the President Amaury Bouchard of the two legal texts which he believed antique, there is still the evidence of his other and more important dedications.
In that year, interspersed amid the still continuing tide of Pamphlets, Diurnals, Sermons, and other ephemerides, were such novel appearances in the London book-world as these two Treatises, one physical, the other metaphysical, by Sir Kenelm Digby, then abroad; an edition of Buxtorf's Hebrew Grammar; an Essay by Lord Herbert of Cherbury; some metrical religious remains of Francis Quarles, then just dead; some attempts to introduce the mystic Jacob Bohme, by specimens of his works; a translation of AEsop's Fables and those of Phaedrus; the issue of the second and third parts of the Epistolae Hoelianae or James Howell's Letters, with a re-issue of his "Dodona's Grove;" and a re-issue of Randolph's comedy of "The Jealous Lovers."
I have discovered no helps to my own devotional life for a moment to set beside Behmen and Andrewes. A Treatise on Baptism and the Lord's Supper; A Key to the Principal Points and Expressions in the Author's Writings; and then a most valuable volume of letters Epistolae Theosophicae complete the extraordinarily rich bibliography of the illuminated and blessed Jacob Behmen.
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