Erasmus, Desiderius (1466?–1536)

Erasmus, Desiderius(1466?–1536)

Desiderius Erasmus, the great Renaissance humanist and scholar, was born at either Rotterdam or Gouda in Holland, the illegitimate son of a priest. As a child he studied at Gouda, and from 1475 to 1483 he studied at Deventer with the Brethren of the Common Life, a pious, modernist-humanist order. Next, he studied at Hertogenbosch, became an Augustinian friar at St. Gregory's (near Gouda), and, in 1492, was ordained a priest. Disliking monastic life, in 1494 he became the Latin secretary to the bishop of Cambrai. The next year he went to the University of Paris to study theology, but he found both the life and the scholastic philosophy distasteful. In 1499 he went to England, where he became a close friend of the humanists John Colet and Thomas More and devoted himself to the study of the classics and sacred literature, desiring to combine the new humanistic spirit, based on the revival of interest in the classics, with Christian learning. In 1500 he returned to the Continent and devoted himself to the study of Greek. One of his first famous works was published in this period, the Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Handbook of a Christian soldier; 1501), an appeal for a return to the simple spirit of early Christianity.

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