The signs of new wealth were everywhere. Large stone houses were going up amid London’s drab timbered houses and grimy workshops. New schools were rising, streets were being paved, and water conduits were being laid down. The windows of luxury-good shops displayed vases, clocks, globes, necklaces, mirrors, and musical instruments. On the Strand alone stood fifty-two goldsmith shops, “so rich and full of silver vessels” as could not be found in Milan, Rome, Florence, and Venice together, marveled the Venetian ambassador.
Along with the splendor, however, came deepening misery. In the countryside, landowners craving more land for their sheep ruthlessly evicted peasants from their plots and enclosed the commons that small farmers had long used to graze cattle and collect firewood. In hundreds of villages, the local economy collapsed, leading to the formation of armies of the dispossessed, who wandered the land with their families in search of food and work. “Sheep ate men” was the shorthand description of the agrarian revolution taking place, making England a country where one man could earn fifty thousand pounds a year while countless children went hungry.
Many of the landless ended up in London. The city was overrun with beggars, vagrants, and vagabonds. Theft was rampant, and even the sight of the bodies of thieves hanging from gibbets produced little deterrence. London was notoriously violent, noisy, and damp, with chill mists rising off the river. It was also filthy. Though there were public privies, most people simply relieved themselves on the street, and dunghills rose on many corners. The stench could be detected up to twenty-five miles away, and infection and disease were rampant. In 1508, London was hit by a major outbreak of the sweating sickness, which carried off hundreds, many within twenty-four hours of being stricken.
The binding agent in this heaving, tumultuous world was the Church. In most villages, the parish church was not only the largest building but also the center of all social and cultural life. The tintinnabulation of church bells was so constant in England that it became known as “the ringing isle.” Through gifts and bequests, the Church at the start of the sixteenth century owned one-fifth to one-third of all land in England. Countrywide, there were some eight hundred monasteries and convents, many of them thick with hangers-on known as “abbey lubbers.” London alone had more than a hundred parish churches, plus many great religious houses, including the Black Friars, Grey Friars, Augustinian Friars, White Friars, Crutched Friars, Carthusians, and Bonhommes.
Towering over them all was St. Paul’s. Sitting on the same spot as today’s cathedral, Old St. Paul’s (which was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666) was, at nearly six hundred feet long, one of Europe’s longest sanctuaries; its nearly five-hundred-foot steeple was visible for miles around. Inside, the church was dark and grimy, with massive pillars and heavy stone bays, but from early morning till late evening it hummed with activity. People promenaded up and down its nave in search of news and gossip; merchants gathered to close deals and settle exchange rates; pilgrims came to worship at the altars of saints. The place was so big that children played ball games in the aisles—an activity that church officials tried repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) to suppress. Every day some forty Masses were performed there, most of them by chantry priests praying for the souls of the departed. The churchyard outside was home to the country’s largest book mart, and the hubbub from it added to the din within.
With its hulk and bustle, St. Paul’s symbolized the integration of Church and society in England. At no time did ecclesiastical power seem greater than at the start of the reign of Henry VIII. Backed by wealth and tradition, the sacraments and the hierarchy, the Church seemed an impregnable rampart of the social order. While in London, however, Erasmus would begin chipping away at it.
During his stay, St. Paul’s was his main sanctuary. His friend John Colet, its dean for five years now, had emerged as London’s most outspoken prelate. When he preached, crowds of courtiers, merchants, artisans, and laborers came to be instructed and inspired. Dressed in black robes rather than the purple ones favored by most senior clerics, Colet urged repentance and devotion to Christ and inveighed against the vanity and worldliness that he said had captured so much of the English clergy.
St. Paul’s had an excellent library, and Colet gave Erasmus access to two early manuscripts of the Vulgate. Erasmus was also able to consult some codices of the Greek New Testament. These documents were central to one of his main projects in this period—revising the Vulgate. Since his discovery of Lorenzo Valla’s annotations on the New Testament, Erasmus had been taking notes on the Latin Bible, marking down passages that seemed garbled, ungrammatical, or unclear. While in Rome, he had had a chance to examine some important manuscripts at the Vatican Library, but he now began to undertake a more systematic collation, cross-checking Greek and Latin manuscripts with printed editions of the Vulgate to detect corruptions and deduce the correct reading.
Erasmus was also making headway with another key part of his reform program—education. Here, too, Colet’s influence was pivotal. On becoming dean of St. Paul’s, Colet had decided that its grammar school (which was four centuries old) was too rigid and old-fashioned to produce the type of upstanding Christian he felt England needed. On the death of his father, in 1505, he inherited a substantial estate, and he decided to use part of it to build a new school with a more modern curriculum that could produce a new generation of virtuous Christians. Soon a stately stone structure was going up in St. Paul’s churchyard. Colet asked Erasmus to teach at the school. He politely declined. When Colet followed with a request for help in preparing instructional texts, he at once agreed. Textbooks were a prime vehicle for weaning young people from the Scholastic emphasis on logic and dialectic and instead instilling humanist values and ideals. Years earlier, while tutoring in Paris, Erasmus had begun work on several such texts; now, stirred by Colet’s interest, he resumed work on them.
One was De Copia (“Foundations of the Abundant Style”), a manual on how to write well. The book was founded on one central premise: that tautology—repeating a word or phrase—is “an ugly and offensive fault.” Suggesting ways to add variety and color to speech, Erasmus offered sections on the use of synonyms, metaphors, archaic words, foreign words, poetic words, indecent words, new words, periphrasis, catachresis, allegory, onomatopoeia, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, meiosis, and more. Mixed in with the grammatical instruction were sermons and admonitions seeking to convey Erasmus’s ideas for reform. As a practical exercise, he urged teachers to assign students a sentence and ask them to express it in as many different ways as possible. As an example, he gave, “Your letter pleased me mightily,” along with more than 140 variants. Some samples: “As a result of your letter, I was suffused by an unfamiliar gladness.” “Nectar I would not prefer to a message from you.” “The charm of your letter put shackles of delight on my soul.” With another example—“Always, as long as I live, I shall remember you”—Erasmus offered two hundred versions, some stretched to the point of parody. “So long as we shall sojourn in this world,” went one, “never shall oblivion of your grace assail me.”
Decades later, François Rabelais, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, would in fact lampoon Erasmus and other champions of the so-called abundant style, offering sentences padded with pointless variations, overripe metaphors, and pompous turns of phrase. De Copia would nonetheless become the most popular writer’s manual of the Renaissance, appearing in 85 editions during Erasmus’s lifetime and more than 150 editions by the end of the sixteenth century. It would be frequently excerpted, pirated, glossed, epitomized, and expanded—and adopted by virtually every school in England.
Considerably shorter but no less influential was De Ratione Studii (“On the Method of Study”), a proposal for a new humanist curriculum. Of the many subjects to which students should be exposed, Erasmus wrote, one stands out: languages. Of languages, only two really mattered: Latin and Greek. In a statement that would become famous, Erasmus declared that “almost everything worth learning is set forth in these two la
nguages.” As for vernacular tongues, the use of which was spreading across Europe, Erasmus dismissed them as vulgar, i.e., common.
As to how the classical languages should be taught, Erasmus proposed an alternative to the stultifying drills of the medieval classroom. After gaining a few rudiments of grammar, students from an early age should read and study the best authors: among the Greeks, Lucian first of all, followed by Demosthenes, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Homer, and Euripides; among the Latins, Terence foremost, followed by Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust. Erasmus was here helping to define the Western canon. Remarkably, in light of his commitment to teaching Christian values, his reading list contains not a single religious work. Nor does it include any contemporary writers, save for Valla, “the extremely elegant arbiter of elegant Latin.” Erasmus does cite other subjects students should learn, among them geography, agriculture, architecture, cooking, mineralogy, mythology, and history, but he mentions these only in passing and even then suggests that they should be taught mainly through readings in the classics. For Erasmus, history was to be learned through Tacitus, science through Pliny, geography via Ptolemy. And those subjects were to be learned through a series of demanding exercises in which students were to practice and master every classical rhetorical device, every part of speech, and a half-dozen kinds of meter.
De Ratione Studii and De Copia (both of which appeared in 1512) would become the basis for all instruction at St. Paul’s, helping make it the first school in England to adopt a humanist curriculum. From there, the Erasmian program would spread to Eton, Winchester, and other top schools. The focus was overwhelmingly on Latin—its grammar, usage, style, and literature—with Greek added at the more advanced schools. All instruction was in these languages. The authors read were for the most part those proposed by Erasmus, and the methods used to teach them were largely those he recommended. Mathematics, the sciences, philosophy, and the English language were neglected and in many cases scorned. By the end of the sixteenth century, the entire framework of English schooling would be built on Erasmian principles. In fact, the humanist curriculum he prescribed would form the foundation for all education in Europe until the latter part of the nineteenth century. (In a well-known study, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, T. W. Baldwin argues that Shakespeare got his fundamental knowledge of rhetoric, literary construction, and literary criticism from the Erasmian curriculum. “Without Erasmus,” Baldwin writes, “we might have had the John Milton of popular concept, but not William Shakspere.”)
The staying power of the Erasmian approach was remarkable. In 1837, a headmaster at St. Paul’s was recorded as informing a parent that “we teach nothing but the classics, nothing but Latin and Greek. If you want your son to learn anything else, you must have him taught at home, and for this purpose we give three half-holidays a week.” Leonard Woolf (the husband of Virginia), who attended St. Paul’s from 1894 to 1899, observed in his autobiography Sowing (published in 1960) that he got “irrational pleasure” from knowing that he had attended a school that was more than four centuries old and connected to Erasmus. Nonetheless, he felt despair at the headmaster’s narrow and fanatical vision for the school, which was to provide students with “the severest and most classical of classical educations.” Students in their final two years “did nothing but Latin and Greek.” Use of the mind, intellectual curiosity, interest in work, and the enjoyment of books were all “violently condemned and persecuted.”
It is striking that Erasmus, who so prized wit, irony, irreverence, and wordplay, would propose an educational program that would prove so stultifying. One result was that the program failed to produce the type of cultivated, conscientious citizen that was its goal. Even the Latin so beloved by Erasmus suffered, for the version taught at St. Paul’s and other schools was not the practical idiom of the medieval classroom but a fossilized version of the classical tongue. By the seventeenth century, Latin would become entombed and Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Hobbes would all write in English.
From a social standpoint, the most striking feature of Erasmus’s education program was its elitism. The urgent task of preparing ordinary citizens for a useful and upright life did not interest him. Rather, he sought to train a specialized caste—an aristocracy of culture and taste—that could lead the rest of society into an era of humanist enlightenment. Knowledge of the classics became a ruthlessly clear marker of class. Erasmus’s neglect of the education of the common man and his lack of interest in universal education help explain why his reform program as a whole failed to develop a broad social base, in contrast to the more populist educational programs offered by Luther and other reformers.
When Erasmus finally reappears on the historical stage, it is in the form of a letter sent from Dover in April 1511 informing a friend that he was headed to Paris to arrange for the printing of the Praise of Folly. Sensing the uproar the tract might cause, he sought to hide his intentions by giving it to a relatively unknown printer, Gilles de Gourmont. (Unfortunately, the printing was badly mangled.) After wrapping up his editorial duties, in June 1511, Erasmus returned to London. He initially stayed with More, but Thomas had a new wife, Alice Middleton (Jane had died a short time earlier), and she took an immediate disliking to Erasmus, due to both his inability to speak English (he relied almost exclusively on Latin) and what she saw as his mooching, so he moved a short distance away to stay with his friend William Grocyn, the rector at St. Lawrence Jewry, a large church in central London.
There, Erasmus resumed his efforts to obtain some of the milk and honey that had lured him back from Italy. Still enjoying a claim on Henry’s affections from their long-ago encounter at Eltham Palace, Erasmus occasionally got in to see the king and was always received cordially. His strongest supporter at the royal court, though, was Catherine, who had been schooled in good letters at the direction of her mother, Isabella of Spain, and who as queen became a generous patron of the New Learning. She tried to enlist Erasmus’s services as a tutor, but he demurred. Meanwhile, William Warham, the archbishop of Canterbury, sought to arrange a benefice for him, but nothing was immediately forthcoming, so Erasmus had to continue imposing on friends.
Then, in the summer of 1511, he received an offer from John Fisher, who was the bishop of Rochester and chancellor of the University of Cambridge, to lecture on Greek at Cambridge. Given his bleak financial situation, Erasmus had no choice but to accept. As his departure date neared, he came down with the sweating sickness, becoming so ill that rumors of his death spread on the Continent. By mid-August, however, he had recovered enough to make the seventy-mile journey to Cambridge, riding on a lame horse through nonstop rain and with little food. Though home to a university that was more than two centuries old, Cambridge remained a backwater of 2,000 residents. Erasmus lived in a room at the top of the southwest tower in the old courtyard of Queen’s College (known to this day as the Erasmus Room). It was just steps from the River Cam, whose banks on mild days offered a prospect for pleasant walks, but there were few of them during the nearly three years Erasmus was in Cambridge. England (like much of Europe) was in the grip of a Little Ice Age that would continue into the nineteenth century, and the weather was persistently gray, cold, and damp, with thick fogs rolling in off the surrounding marshes. Achy and frail in the best of times, Erasmus was almost constantly sick; after one long stretch of rain in winter, he had such a sore throat that he could communicate only “by nods and gestures.”
Alone for much of the time, he sought to stay in touch with the world through his letters. Shorn of the literary flourishes in much of his correspondence, they show the everyday Erasmus. He expresses concern about finding reliable messengers, laments the lack of good copyists, discusses the care of his horses, tries to arrange places to stay on his periodic visits to London, and complains about the quality of the wine. Writing to Henry VIII’s Latin secretary Andrea Ammonio, his main correspondent in this period, Erasmus pleads, “If you are in a position to arrange for a small cask o
f Greek wine, the best obtainable, to be sent to me here, you would have done what will make your friend perfectly happy. But quite dry wine please.” After an outbreak of the plague, Erasmus wrote to Colet that “everyone is running away from Cambridge in all directions; I myself have already withdrawn to the country, but perhaps the want of wine will drive me back to Cambridge!” Even when the plague abated and Cambridge was full, he lamented, the town “is a lonely place for me.” Amid the damp and gray, he pined for Rome. “I cannot without anguish recall the climate, the green places, the colonnades, and the honeyed talk with scholars—the light of the world, the positions, the prospects.”
He was faring little better with his lectures. John Fisher had arranged for his position to help promote humanistic studies at the university. Erasmus’s subject was the Greek grammar of Chrysoloras, the Byzantine scholar whose lectures in Florence beginning in 1397 had marked the start of the recovery of Greek in the West. His grammar, printed in Venice in 1475, was popular in Italy, and Erasmus was now trying to introduce it in this soggy cow pasture. But attendance was sparse. The faculty remained in the grip of the Scholastics, who continued to regard Greek with suspicion, and at every turn Erasmus found himself doing battle with the Scotists—“the most unbeatable and most successfully complacent class of men there is.” His pay was so meager that it did not even cover his basic living expenses, and so, to his humiliation, he had to continue to pester his friends. “I often curse these miserable literary pursuits of mine that produce so little.”
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