Johann Rhau-Grunenberg: Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg, 94–98; Pettegree, Brand Luther, 42–44.
Lucas Cranach the Elder: Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg, 125–129; Pettegree, Brand Luther, 148–163. For a full biographical treatment, see Steven Ozment, The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation.
described its citizens as drunken: Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg, 64.
welcomed the numbness: Brecht, Martin Luther, 64.
confessions steadily lengthened: Ibid., 68.
“My conscience”: Luther’s Works, vol. 27, 13, 73.
“a damned ungrateful papal ass”: Quoted in Fife, Revolt of Martin Luther, 145.
Humpelwerk and Puppensünde: Cited in Brecht, Martin Luther, 69; “If Christ is to help you”: quoted in Friedenthal, Luther, 45.
tried to expose him: Luther described the impact of Staupitz’s instruction in a letter of May 30, 1518, to him, in Luther’s Works, vol. 48, no. 21, 64–70.
Staupitz came up with a plan: Luthers Werke, Tischreden, vol. 5, no. 5371, 98; no. 6422, 654. See also Bainton, Here I Stand, 45; Boehmer, Road to Reformation, 83.
from this “poor little room”: Quoted in Friedenthal, Luther, 94; original is in Luthers Werke, Tischreden, vol. 2, nos. 2540a and 2540b, 509–510.
became a doctor of theology: Brecht, Martin Luther, 127.
the first two: As Brecht notes (ibid., 129), it is unclear if Luther gave an earlier set of lectures.
the central place these hymns had: “Psalms,” in Encyclopedia of Christianity.
“A precious and beloved book”: Luther’s Works, vol. 35, “Preface to the Psalter,” 253–257.
“is properly a garden of nuts”: Luther’s Works, vol. 10, “First Lectures on the Psalms I,” 257.
they were probably composed: Robert Alter, introduction to The Book of Psalms (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), xvi. See also the introduction to the Psalms in The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, augmented third edition), 775–777.
Nicholas of Lyra: Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism, 170–195; Deanna Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Believers: Nicholas Lyra and Christian Readings of Jewish Texts in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1–6, 31.
the Quincuplex Psalterium: Charles M. Cooper, “Jerome’s ‘Hebrew Psalter’ and the New Latin Version,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 69(3): 233–244, September 1950.
burgeoning new field of Hebraic studies: As both Smalley in Study of the Bible (365) and Cohen in Friars and the Jews (171–172) point out, there was an earlier flourishing of Hebrew studies among Christians in the thirteenth century.
was even more difficult: W. Schwarz, Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation, 63–68.
hard to come by: Ibid., 67.
So were instructors: Ibid., 65.
often reluctant to teach Hebrew: Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 13, 165.
was thus considered contaminated: Ibid., 164. “Those who study the language become Jews,” was how a Freiburg monk put it (as quoted in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, 43).
he had obtained a copy: Grossmann, Humanism in Wittenberg, 79. According to David H. Price in Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books (213), Luther was one of the most diligent students of Reuchlin’s book during the 1510s.
present from a very early point: Baron, in Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 13 (220–221), observes that of his thirty-two years of teaching at Wittenberg, Luther devoted only three or four to the New Testament and the rest to the Hebrew Bible: his lifetime preoccupation with the Old Testament, Baron adds, made him less rather than more friendly to contemporary Jews. Mullett, in Martin Luther (52), notes of his lectures on the Psalms that “in this his first major work that has come down to us, Luther initiated the anti-Judaism that would characterise many of his writings throughout his career.”
far from occupying: Heiko Oberman, in The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation (94), writes that it is time “we faced the fact that the Jewish question does not occupy a dark corner in Luther’s work, but a central place in his theology.”
Almost single-handedly, Johannes Reuchlin: For biographical information, see Price, Johannes Reuchlin; Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, 61–80; “Reuchlin, Johann,” in Contemporaries of Erasmus.
Hebrew, he declared, is simple: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 59.
he seemed to see God himself: Cited in Schwarz, Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation, 82–83.
a learned Jew named Calman: Spitz, Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, 62.
A turning point came in 1490: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 64. On Pico and the Kabbalah, see Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 13, 174–176.
The Miracle-Working Word: Spitz, Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, 68–69.
Obadiah Sforno: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 67.
Reuchlin prepared a rudimentary guide: Ibid., 14, 23, 68–69. Schwarz, in Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation (66–67), notes that although a Hebrew grammar had been published a few years earlier by Conradus Pellicanus, it was of poor quality; De Rudimentis, he adds, marked the true beginning of Hebrew studies in Europe.
Johannes Pfefferkorn: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 95–112.
“criminal dogs”: Ibid., 106.
deprived of their books: Erika Rummel, The Case Against Johannes Reuchlin, 9–10.
led the anti-Jewish agitation: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 109–110.
Pfefferkorn chose Frankfurt: Ibid., 111–112.
The Frankfurt city council: H. Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4, 429–431.
supported the confiscations: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 126–127.
In a forty-plus page analysis: Johannes Reuchlin, Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy, and Burn All Jewish Books, trans. Peter Wortsman; “I have no doubt,” 86.
represented an extraordinary moment: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 137, 227ff; Heiko Oberman, “Reuchlin and the Jews: Obstacles on the Path to Emancipation,” in The Impact of the Reformation, 169–170; Oberman, “Three Sixteenth-Century Attitudes Toward Judaism: Reuchlin, Erasmus, and Luther,” in B. D. Cooperman, ed., Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 93; Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4, 448–449.
a distinction they hold to this day: Spitz, Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, 77.
another noxious pamphlet: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 141–143.
Titled Augenspiegel: Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4, 446–449; Valerie Hotchkiss and David Price, Miracle Within a Miracle: Johannes Reuchlin and the Jewish Book Controversy, 15–17.
lodged charges of heresy: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 145–146; Hotchkiss and Price, Miracle Within a Miracle, 14–15.
In his fierce Defense: Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 148–150.
condemned Augenspiegel: Ibid., 150–152.
issued its judgment: Hotchkiss and Price, Miracle Within a Miracle, 18.
a letter to the Dutch scholar: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 2, no. 290, April 1514, 284–285.
a deeper reason for Erasmus’s reticence: See James H. Overfield, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany, 287–289.
“see the entire Old Testament”: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 5, 181.
“I see them as a nation”: Ibid., 347–348.
“I wish he were an entire Jew”: Ibid., 179.
“This half-Jew Christian”: Ibid., no. 713, November 15 [1517], 204.
“If it is Christian to detest”: Ibid., vol. 7, 49.
Erasmus’s rancor toward the Jews: There is an extensive literature on this subject. See, for instance, Oberman, Roots of Anti-Semitism (38–40), who writes that “the entire body of Erasmus’s thought is perme
ated by a virulent theological anti-Judaism.” Hilmar M. Pabel, in “Erasmus of Rotterdam and Judaism: A Reexamination in the Light of New Evidence,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 87: 1996, notes (16, 36) that Erasmus in his paraphrases poured “scorn upon Jews and their religion” and showed “an unmistakable hostility towards Judaism.” By contrast, Shimon Markish, in Erasmus and the Jews (142–143), argues that it is “unfounded to speak of Erasmus’ hatred for Jews”; rather, he was indifferent to them. Erasmus’s “judeophobic ‘eruptions,’” he adds, were few and “incidental” to his work and reflected “not Erasmus’ worldview but rather common ‘folk’ anti-Semitism, a mass psychology alien to and despised by Erasmism.” In an extraordinary afterword to Markish’s book, Arthur A. Cohen, a Jewish philosopher who helped arrange for it to be translated from Russian into English, argues (146, 154) that Markish unwittingly succeeded “in showing that Erasmus is thoroughly anti-Jewish.” Erasmus’s anti-Judaism, he added, “was frequently gratuitous, crude, malicious, intemperate, lacking in all that grace and charity with which he otherwise pursued his return to the sources of Christian civilization in the ancient world.” Erasmus, Cohen concludes, “is surely within a grand tradition of contempt and supersession that leads, if not to the crude fulminations of Julius Streicher, then surely through the permutations of secular diabolism straight to the death camps.” In seeking to put Markish right, Cohen may be erring in the opposite direction.
“the most pernicious plague”: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 4, 267.
among its leading purveyors: See Oberman, “Reuchlin and the Jews,” 166; Price, Johannes Reuchlin 217, 229.
the Jews themselves were being purged: “Germany,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica. Price, in Johannes Reuchlin (225), notes that during Reuchlin’s lifetime, Jewish communities probably reached the lowest point of their historical decline prior to the Holocaust, with only about one-eighth of the urban Jewish communities of the year 1400 still existing in 1520. As Arthur A. Cohen notes in Markish, Erasmus and the Jews (148), “every thinker of the northern Renaissance was to a more or less significant degree anti-Semitic.”
the one Christian country: Jeremy Cohen, Friars and the Jews, 159.
He knew few actual Jews: Marius, Luther, 372; E. Gordon Rupp, Martin Luther and the Jews (London: Council of Christians and Jews, 1972), 10; Ronny Kabus, Juden der Lutherstadt Wittenberg im III. Reich (Elbe-Druckerei Wittenberg GMbH, 2003), 8.
a popular motif in German-speaking lands: Frederick M. Schweitzer, “Medieval Perceptions of Jews and Judaism,” in Marvin Perry, ed., Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 155–156.
Spalatin sought Luther’s opinion: Brecht, Martin Luther, 162.
In his letter: Luther’s Works, vol. 48, no. 3, to George Spalatin, August 5, 1514, 8–11.
“The first psalm speaks”: Ibid., vol. 10, “First Lectures on the Psalms,” I, 11.
fundamentally about Christ: In his preface to his notes on the Psalms, Luther wrote that “every prophecy and every prophet must be understood as referring to Christ the Lord, except where it is clear from plain words that someone else is spoken of.” Ibid., 7.
The “man,” Luther wrote: Ibid., 11.
“This is what the Jews”: Ibid., 12.
“that death-dealing doctrine”: Ibid., 13.
meditate on vanities: Ibid., 17, 19, 18.
set up their own righteousness: Ibid., 28.
“did not set up his own righteousness”: Ibid., 26–27.
an arresting paradox: Ibid., 31, 34.
only a handful of them: As calculated by David Nirenberg in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, 254.
“look for an exclusively human deliverance”: Luther’s Works, vol. 10, 227–228, 394.
audience consisted mostly: Ibid., 8.
“a man of middle stature”: Quoted in Wilhelm Pauck, introduction to Luther: Lectures on Romans, lxi–lxii.
“Earrings”: Luther’s Works, vol. 10, 189; “goats,” 320; “frog,” vol. 11, “First Lectures on the Psalms,” II, 75; “curdled mountains,” vol. 10, 336.
that he was righteous: Ibid., vol. 11, 172–174.
he suggested that the faithful: Ibid., vol. 11, 534.
CHAPTER 11: A BLUEPRINT FOR EUROPE
stayed with Thomas More: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 2, 161. Erasmus described the More household in a sketch of his friend, vol. 7, 16–25.
the excitement sweeping England: Jasper Ridley, Henry VIII, 35–36, 41; Alison Weir, Henry VIII: King and Court, 1–3.
a “golden age”: Miller, Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 3, part 2, 113–115.
Henry was widely read: Ridley, Henry VIII, 39; Weir, Henry VIII, 128; J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 12–17 (“a pretty woman,” 13).
forced to remain indoors: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 2, 161.
The Praise of Folly: Dolan, Essential Erasmus, 98–173; “The fellow who kisses,” 112, Old women, “so like corpses,” 121–122; “What divorces,” 113; “because they have gold rings,” 137; “what could be more enjoyable,” 128; “a lock of goat’s wool,” 142; the British take pride, 132; “Why should I go on,” 132; Thomists, Nominalists, 144, 152; Did divine generation, 143–144; “magnificent creatures,” 148–151; reproaches bishops, 156; “a great many copyists,” 157; buffoons who calculate, 129, 147, 165, 144; Jesus could have mounted a lion, 168; “whom the ardor of religion,” 169; “suffer from something akin to madness,” 172; “that is not quite coherent,” 172.
first bestselling work: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 27, 78–82; Smith, Erasmus, 123–125.
disappears from the historical record: Allen, Age of Erasmus, 143.
“two lost years”: See J. K. Sowards, “The Two Lost Years of Erasmus: Summary, Review, and Speculation,” Studies in the Renaissance, 9: 161–186, 1962.
in the City: Roy Porter, London: A Social History, 26ff, 42.
the impact of the new economic system: Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, vol. 1, 7–19, 28–29; E. Lipson, The Economic History of England, vol. 2, The Age of Mercantilism, 3rd ed., 1–93; Eleanora Carus-Wilson, “The Woolen Industry,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2, Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, 413–416, 420–428.
“so rich and full of silver vessels”: Quoted in R. W. Chambers, Thomas More, 105.
The binding agent: On its influence, see Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998), 138–144; Maynard Smith, Pre-Reformation England, chap. 2, “The State of the Church,” 11–90.
“the ringing isle”: Maynard Smith, Pre-Reformation England, 105; “abbey lubbers,” 205.
Old St. Paul’s: William Bonham and Charles Welch, Medieval London (The Portfolio, London, no. 42, November 1901), 16; Inwood, History of London, 142; Ann Saunders, St. Paul’s : The Story of the Cathedral (London: Collins and Brown, 2001), 16.
ecclesiastical power seem greater: Maynard Smith, Pre-Reformation England, 11.
chipping away at it: The case for Erasmus’s influence on the English Reformation is most fully laid out by James Kelsey McConica in English Humanists and Reformation Politics Under Henry VIII and Edward VI, (2–4, 12, 42–43, 280). Erasmianism, he argues, won the allegiance of “the whole English humanist community in the years before the crisis of the royal divorce” and through it had a strong impact on English thinking as a whole. J. J. Scarisbrick, in The Reformation and the English People (47), observes that while “Erasmianism did not necessarily radicalize,” it “undoubtedly helped to undermine the old order nonetheless.” See also A. G. Dickens and Whitney R. D. Jones, Erasmus the Reformer, chap. 9, “The English Erasmians,” 193–216.
London’s most outspoken prelate: Seebohm, Oxford Reformers, 83–86; Maynard Smith, Pre-Reformation England, 454–456.
two early manuscripts: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 3, 198. On the New Testament manuscripts that Erasmus used in England, see Andrew J. Brown, “The Manus
cript Sources and Textual Character of Erasmus’ 1516 Greek New Testament,” in Basel 1516: Erasmus’ Edition of the New Testament, Martin Wallraff, Silvana Seidel Menchi, Kaspar von Greyerz, eds., 130–137.
a more systematic collation: Erika Rummel describes the process in Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament, 109–111.
Colet had decided: John Gleason, John Colet, 220–223, 228–230; J. H. Lupton, The Life of John Colet, D.D.: Dean of St. Paul’s and Founder of St. Paul’s School, 154–177.
De Copia: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, 296–659; “an ugly and offensive fault,” 302; “Your letter pleased me mightily,” 348ff; “Always, as long as I live,” 354ff.
would in fact lampoon Erasmus: See Mack, “Humanist Rhetoric and Dialectic,” in Kraye, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 93.
eighty-five editions: Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 2, 225, and vol. 24, 283.
De Ratione Studii: Ibid., vol. 24, 665–691; “almost everything worth learning,” 667.
proposed an alternative: Ibid., 669; “the extremely elegant arbiter,” 670.
history was to be learned: See Smith, Erasmus, 305–307.
would become the basis: William Harrison Woodward, Studies in Education During the Age of the Renaissance, vol. 2, 104–126; T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, vol. 1, 94, 99, 130, 179. (“Shakspere” is his spelling.) J. K. Sowards, “Erasmus and the Apologetic Textbook,” Studies in Philology 55: 122–135, 1958.
“Without Erasmus”: Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine, vol. 1, 116.
“we teach nothing but the classics”: Quoted in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Public School Phenomenon, 31.
Leonard Woolf: Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880–1904, 79, 213–214, 80–81, 84, 96–97.
prove so stultifying: Baldwin, in William Shakspere’s Small Latine, vol. 1, 163, writes that the Erasmian system was “simple but inhumanly thorough—at least on paper. No wonder the master had to flog the boys throughout. One wonders how a human being, either teacher or boy, endured it. . . . Education! Education! What crimes are committed in thy name!”
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