S. Ryle

Erasmus and the Renaissance Republic of Letters (Disputatio) S. Ryle

This volume contains a selection from among the papers delivered at a conference held to mark the centenary of a watershed event in early modern studies: the appearance of Volume I of P. S. Allen's edition of Erasmus's letters. Erasmus scholarship has been a growing field since the late twentieth century, owing to the enormous volume and vast intellectual range of his oeuvre and to the reprinting of his works from the 1960s onwards, while Allen's edition has proved the basis for research for scholars of almost every aspect of Renaissance humanism and the Reformation.

The conference aimed to investigate as many aspects as possible of Erasmus's literary, educational, rhetorical, and theological activities and of their influence on the emerging Europe of the early modern era. The essays collected here present a wide-ranging overview of the current state of Erasmus scholarship, including a survey of the discoveries of letters to and from Erasmus unknown to Allen, the printing for the first time since 1529 of the opening section of an important letter to him from Germain de Brie, an account of the crucial role played by Ulrich von Hutten in the publication of the dialogue Iulius exclusus e coelis, and several studies of the influence of Erasmian thought on early modern political and theological controversies. With its broad coverage of the current field, the volume will prove indispensable to Erasmus scholars.