This volume of the Amsterdam critical edition of Erasmus’s complete works (commonly called ASD) contains Erasmus’s several, increasingly frustrated attempts to rebut the criticisms of his Paraphrases on the books of the New Testament by Natalis Beda (Noël Bédier), syndic of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris. When in 1523 the Faculty was charged with reviewing the orthodoxy of the Paraphrase on Luke, Beda and his staff compiled a list of objections and errors that resulted in an official condemnation of the Paraphrases in 1527. After an initial lag on both sides in 1523–25 and unfruitful correspondence between Erasmus and Beda, the quarrel burst into print when Beda published a book critical of someone else’s biblical scholarship and added his criticisms of Erasmus as an appendix. Erasmus’s side of the ensuing public dispute is the series of pamphlets contained here: Divinationes (Conjectures) ad notata per Bedam, with the Prologus in Supputationem (Final Accounting) calumniarum Natalis Bedae (1526); In Natalis Bedae censuras Elenchus (1526); Supputationes errorum in censuris Natalis Bedae (1526); and Responsio ad notulas Bedaicas (1529). All these hitherto have been available to scholars only in the editions of Erasmus’s printer Froben (now also in digitized form online from libraries in Basel and Munich) or in the Leiden edition (LB) of 1703–06. Not included are the letters between Beda and Erasmus, already available in several modern editions. The volume follows the ASD pattern, with an extensive editor’s introduction, a critical apparatus, and a set of explanatory notes. The editorial language is English, with much quotation in Latin in the notes.

Rabbie’s editorial work is exemplary. His introduction, while clearly marking his own conjectures about motive and method, lays out the complicated back-and-forth between Erasmus and his opponent, and provides a very substantial bibliography. His critical apparatus reports variants among the Froben editions and LB. Rabbie also takes full account of an autograph codex, discovered in 1965 in the Royal Library in Copenhagen: it contains the (or a) first version of the Divinationes along with some other Erasmian pieces from the period 1525 to 1527. Even printed editions offer an occasional tidbit: there is a four-line poem in iambics that headed the Supputationes in Froben’s 1527 edition, not noticed in other editions or in collections of Erasmus’s poetry; it need not be but could be by Erasmus himself.

The explanatory notes are quite generous. The editor compares formal features of composition to similar practices among Erasmus’s contemporaries; tracks down parallels in Erasmus’s other works; and locates and quotes allusions to and citations from scripture, church fathers, canon law, liturgy and hymnody, and other persons, books, and topics in church life up to and in Erasmus’s day. When the Frenchman Beda scolds Erasmus for calling Henry VIII King of England and France, Rabbie notes the history of that title from 1340 to 1801 (141). He identifies and gives a telling sample of the plagiarism of Erasmus’s Prologus committed by one Antonius Galfridus in 1534 (19). Rabbie is particularly acute at explaining the different levels of Latin — classical, biblical, Scholastic, medieval, and Neo-Latin — that can be found in these pieces, and how Erasmus manipulates them to add effect to his remarks. For instance, he points out Erasmus’s rather malicious rephrasing “Pugnat, inquit” (“they are at war, he says”) of Beda’s comment “non stant simul” (“they are incompatible”), a Scholastic logician’s phrase, on two statements in Erasmus’s explanation of his Paraphrases (143). Everywhere there is ample citation of modern bibliography on the individuals and issues that Erasmus’s pen (and Beda’s) touches upon.

Of such fine examples in this volume there is no end. Modern scholars, not only Erasmians, but all students of the early modern era in Europe, will be much in Rabbie’s debt for the thoroughness, vivacity, and clarity with which he has presented Erasmus and his context in this war of words.