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Erasmus' Biographical Masterpiece: Hieronymi Stridonensis Vita

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

John B. Maguire
John B. Maguire*
Affiliation:
Loyola University of Chicago
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Extract

Erasmus shared with many Renaissance men a more than passing interest in biographical writing. He recommended Plutarch's Lives on several occasions, edited and annotated Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and more importantly, several times tried his own hand at life-writing. In addition to biographical sketches of his contemporaries More, Colet, Vitrier, and Warham, Erasmus wrote lives of Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, and other early Church Fathers to serve as introductions to the Froben editions of their works.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1973 , pp. 265 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1973

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References

1 See The Education of a Christian Prince, tr. Born, Lester K. (New York, 1936), p. 200 Google Scholar. Also, in Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, eds. Allen, P. S., Allen, H. M., etc. (Oxford, 1906-58)Google Scholar, see Erasmus’ letters to Valentine Furster (Allen, VI, 481) and to Brixius (Allen, IX, 108). His edition of Suetonius is C. Suetonii Tranquilli XII Caesares… Annotata in eundem, et in loca aliquot restituta per D. Erasmum Roter (Cologne, 1539).

2 The More sketch can be found in Allen, IV, 12-23; those of Colet and Vitrier are in the same volume, pp. 507-527, and those of Warham in Allen, X, 144-147, and in volume five, 810E-812B, of Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. J. Leclerc (Leyden, 1703- 06). Erasmus’ introductory lives of the Fathers of the Church, with the sole exception of Jerome's, can all be found in either of the two parts of volume three of the Leclerc work.

3 P. 129. Ferguson's introduction, though brief, is very valuable and I am indebted to it for several details concerning the Hieronymi… Vita. Peter G. Bietenholz, in his monograph History and Biography in the Work of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Geneva, 1966), treats all of Erasmus’ biographical writings, but his emphasis is considerably different from mine, though there is no disagreement between us.

4 Allen, I, 531.

5 Footnotes five through twenty all refer to Erasmi Opuscula. Since the translations given in the text are all my own, this and the following references arc to the line numbers of Erasmus’ Latin text. The passages translated here are to be found in lines 1-8 and 65-78.

6 Lines 115-117.

7 Lines 120-127.

8 Lines 161-164.

9 Lines 428 and 432.

10 Lines 171-174.

11 Lines 274-275.

12 Lines 1049-52.

13 Lines 223-224.

14 Lines 201-230.

15 Lines 751-760.

16 Lines 378-388.

17 Lines 651-656.

18 Lines 814-815.

19 Lines 1072-79.

20 Lines 1455-61.

21 See, for instance, StaufFer's English Biography Before 1700; Marie Schutt's Die englische Biographik der Tudor Zeit (Hamburg, 1930); or John Francis Weimer's ‘Biographical Writing in Sixteenth Century England (A Catalog Raisonne).’ University of Wisconsin Dissertation, 1954.

22 See James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965), pp. 82-83.

23 Even the most cursory survey of English religious controversial writings of the sixteenth century will substantiate this affirmation. McConica, for instance, says that the tracts of Richard Moryson, one of the propagandists recruited by Cromwell in the mid- 1530's, ‘reflect the atmosphere of [Pole's Paduan household] in their citations from Jerome, Vives, and Erasmus…’ (p. 172). More, it will be remembered, in his advice to Henry to consult the writings of the ‘old holy doctors’ on the matter of the divorce, listed Jerome first among them.

24 See especially in Allen, 1, 517-518, 525-528, 530-532, 540-541; and in Allen, II, 27- 29, 68-73, 79-90. 114-117, and 210-221.

25 Allen, II, 354.

26 See Thomson, D. F. S., Erasmus and Cambridge (Toronto, 1963), p. 218.Google Scholar

27 'The Development of Sixteenth-Century Biography in the Tradition of Erasmus and Thomas More,’ Stanford University Dissertation, 1970.

28 Cambridge, Mass., 1930. See the whole first chapter, ‘The Medieval Period,’ pp. 3-33.

29 See, for example, the cited works of Stauffer, Schutt, and Weimer, passim.