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The Ages of Erasmus and the Year of His Birth*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Harry Vredeveid
Harry Vredeveid*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

It is a Perennial Paradox of Erasmus studies that neither the wealth of autobiographical information that the Dutch humanist has left us nor the enormous mass of scholarly literature that has grown up around his life and works has ever given us a firm grip on the year of his birth and the chronology of his youth. We do not know with certainty, for example, how old Erasmus was when he entered Steyn monastery. If he were born in 1466, as he indicates at times, and became a postulant in the middle of 1487, as other information suggests, he would then have been twenty years of age. Yet in an appeal to Pope Leo X for a release from some of his monastic obligations in August 1516 Erasmus asserts that he was just sixteen when he was prevailed upon to enter the monastery. On the strength of this and other evidence R. L. DeMolen has argued with equal logic that Erasmus must have been born in 1469 and entered Steyn in 1485-86.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 754 - 809
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1993

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Footnotes

*

I wish to express my warmest thanks to Nicolaas van der Blom and Clarence H. Miller, who kindly read over a draft of this article and suggested numerous improvements. My title is adapted from a chapter heading in Koch, 39: “Erasmus’ Year of Birth and Erasmus’ Ages.” In rendering Erasmus into English, I have greatly profited by the translations in CWE.

These abbreviations are used throughout:

ASD Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami. Amsterdam, 1969-

CEBR Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation. Ed. P. G. Bietenholz and T. B. Deutscher. 3 vols. Toronto, 1985-87.

CV Compendium vitae in EE 1:47-52 (Ep. II). For a translation, see CWE4:403-10.

CWE Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto, 1974- .

EE Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. Ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod. 11 vols. Oxford, 1906-47.

Ep. Refers to a letter by Erasmus in EE.

LB Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami opera omnia. Ed. J. Leclerc. 10 vols. Leiden, 1703- 06; rpt. Hildesheim, 1961-62.

Poem Refers to a poem by Erasmus in CWE 85-86, edited and annotated by H. Vredeveid and translated by C. H. Miller.

R. Refers to a poem by Erasmus in Reedijk.

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