This volume comprises Erasmus' correspondence during the final two years of his life, June 1534-August 1536. In the public sphere it was a time of dramatic events: the reconquest of the duchy W?rttemberg from its Austrian occupiers; the siege and destruction of the Anabaptist "kingdom" at M?nster; Charles V's great victory at Tunis; and the resumption of the Habsburg-Valois wars in Italy. In the private sphere, these were years of deteriorating health, thoughts of impending death, and the loss of close friends (including Thomas Fisher and Thomas More, both executed by Henry VIII). At the same time, however, Erasmus managed to publish his longest book, EcclesiastesEcclesiastes, and to make arrangements, in his final will, for his considerable wealth to be spent for charitable purposes after his death.
Desiderius Erasmus, was born at Rotterdam, apparently on October 28, 1466, the illegitimate son of a physician's daughter by a man who afterwards turned monk. On his parents' death his guardians insisted on his entering a monastery and in the Augustinian college of Stein near Gouda he spent six years -- it was certainly this personal experience of the ways of the monks that made Erasmus their relentless enemy.
In 1519 appeared the first edition of his Colloquia, usually regarded as his masterpiece. The audacity and incisiveness with which it handles the abuses of the Church prepared men's minds for the subsequent work of Martin Luther.
Erasmus stands as the supreme type of cultivated common sense applied to human affairs. He rescued theology from the pedantries of the Schoolmen, exposed the abuses of the Church, and did more than any other single person to advance the Revival of Learning.
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