Humanism and Erasmus.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

One of the great Humanist teachers who ushered in the Renaissance and Reformation was Erasmus, a theologian and scholar from the Dutch city of Rotterdam. Neither English nor Protestant, Erasmus was nevertheless enormously influential in England. He was one of the scholars who helped introduce the printing press at Cambridge University and pressed for major changes in the manner of university instruction in the domains of language, literature, and religion. At the behest of his friend and patron John Colet, Erasmus also re-designed the educational curriculum of St. Paul’s grammar school. St. Paul’s was the very best of London’s grammar schools and all the other top schools soon imitated its new curriculum. The Humanist education developed by Erasmus and others like him was enormously effective and played a major role in the blossoming of creative talent in the Early-Modern period. Early modern authors, who were educated in the Humanist grammar schools, include Edmund Spenser, Philip and Mary Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Milton—in other words, the Humanists taught and helped produce the great founding authors of the English literary tradition.

Excerpt from Erasmus’s Antibarbarians regarding the ancient poets                                                                                                                                           

 “Why Batt, whoever would have believed that a poetic fellow like you would have so much theology in him? I swear by the favour of your Muses, you seem to me to have explained Paul’s meaning most accurately, and as far as I can see no theological term escapes you; from what I have heard I should think you would make a beautiful preacher…”

Batt laughed and said, “…What an impudent fellow you are, to be surprised at theological knowledge in me, a poet… If I were a theologian, that would not mean that I was straying from the domain of the poet. In ancient times poets and theologians were held to be the same people…” (74)

Excerpt from Erasmus’s introduction to his new translation of the Greek Bible                                                                                                                       

[M]ake your heart itself into a library of Christ…From it, like from the provident householder, you can bring forth “new things and old” as they should be needed. For these things which come forth from your own heart, as it were, practically alive, penetrate far more vividly into the souls of your listeners than those things which are gathered from a hodgepodge of other authors. (Ratio 341)

The apian figure of poetic creation; analogous to Erasmus’s “heart as library of Christ”                                                                                                    

One of the most venerable and elegant figures used to describe the process of imitation (mimesis) is the apian metaphor, with notable classical examples in Lucretius, Horace, and Seneca. Surveying (and renewing) such classical examples, Petrarch writes: “This is the substance of Seneca’s counsel, and Horace’s before him, that we should write as the bees make sweetness, not storing up the flowers but turning them into honey, thus making one thing of many various ones, but different and better” (Light in Troy 98)