Although eight years have passed between the presentation and publication of these conference papers, they are worth the wait. With exacting care, Stephen Ryle has edited nearly 500 pages with footnotes, bibliographies, and an index that lists each citation of Erasmus’s letters. Included among the essays is Michel Magnien’s discussion of Erasmus’s ep. 2021 (12 August 1528) from Germain de Brie (ca. 1490–1538), which is largely a defense of Guillaume Budé, slighted in Erasmus’s Ciceronianus. Magnien has discovered a 1529 version of ep. 2021 from Paris with forty-three lines not found in Basel 1528, Paris 1528, Allen vol. 7, or CWE 14. Elsewhere, Clare M. Murphy covers the correspondence with Thomas More (1477/78–1535). Noteworthy is the letter-biography of More in ep. 999, Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutton (23 July 1519), and More’s ideas on the education of women in ep. 1233, Erasmus to Guillaume Budé (September 1521). Hanan Yoran also notes three letter-essays by More, to Martin Dorp (1515), Edward Lee (1519), and a monk (1519–20).
Alexandre Vanautgaerden, in another contribution, suggests that Erasmus drafted the letter to the reader signed by the printer Dirk Martens (1446/47–1534). An appendix gives twenty short letters in Latin. Charles Fantazzi analyzes the correspondence with Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540). He has translated the De Conscribendis Epistolis of Erasmus (CWE 25) and Vives (Brill, 1997), but I needed more information other than ep. 1111 (ca. June 1520) being “the high point in the Erasmus-Vives correspondence” (147), with it all going downhill for the rest of the decade.
Erika Rummel examines the correspondence with Wolfgang Capito (1478–1541) from ep. 541 (26 February 1517) to ep. 1368 (18 June 1523), giving the date of every letter she cites, while Marie Barral-Baron studies the correspondence with George, Duke of Saxony (1471–1539) — twenty-one letters from Erasmus and ten from George (1517–31). I checked the record for Henry VIII (1491–1547): two to Prince Henry and one from him (1499–1507); ten to King Henry and one from him (1513–28). Finally, Isabelle Diu traces a growing flexibility in Erasmus’s theory of translation from Greek to Latin in three letter prefaces: ep. 188 (24 January 1506), preface to Hecuba; ep. 198 (about July 1506), preface to Iphigenia; ep. 208 (November 1507), second preface to Iphigenia.
Erasmus died before Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) was born, so they never corresponded with each other. Jeanine de Landtsheer claims that both men sent or received letters from only seven women, but I count nine for Erasmus: Catherine of Aragon, Mary of Hungary, Margaret of Valois, Anna van Borssele, Margaret More Roper, Margaret Welser Peutinger, and Elisabeth, a nun, in addition to the Benedictine nuns of Cologne and Franciscan nuns near Cambridge (see my “Contemporary Women in the Letters of Erasmus,” Erasmus Yearbook 9 [1989]: 34–72). Letizia Panizza in her essay traces attitudes to marriage: negative in Jerome, ambivalent in Petrarch and Boccaccio, and positive in Plutarch and Valla. This is the tradition behind Erasmus’s Encomium Matrimonii (1518), included as a model letter in De Conscribendis Epistolis (1522).
The essays that follow allude to Erasmus’s letters but focus on other works: Adagia (1500–36) by Romano Ruggeri, Ari Wesseling, and Hanan Yoran; Julius Exclusus (1517) by Silvana Seidel Menchi; Paraphrase on Luke (1523) by Jane E. Phillips; Colloquies (1518–33) by Beatrice Périgot; Ciceronianus (1528) by Catherine Langlois-Pézeret; De Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia (1533) by Dominic Baker-Smith; and Paraphrases on the Gospels and Acts in English (1548) by Gregory Dodds. Stephen Ryle, James McConica, and Mark Vessey also record the growing accuracy of chronological order achieved by editors of Erasmus’s letters: Jean LeClerc (1703–06); F. M. Nichols [through 1517] (1901–18); and P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod (1906–58).
Seven of the essays are written in French, including Vanautgaerden’s. Seidel Menchi’s essay is translated from Italian, but Ruggeri’s is not. We have a French translation of P. S. Allen by Alois Gerlo (1967–84) and an English translation in process (1974–). We need translations of Allen into other modern languages, and, as Christine Bénévent rightly claims, an online edition of him as well.
