Controversies with Edward Lee (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Controversies with Edward Lee Travis DeCook (bio) Erasmus. Controversies with Edward Lee. Volume 72 of Collected Works of Erasmus. Edited by Jane E. Phillips. Translated by Erika Rummel University of Toronto Press. xxxviii, 450. $150.00 Volume 72 of the Collected Works of Erasmus (CWE) contains the first English translations of Erasmus's responses to the attacks of the English theologian Edward Lee, one of the most vehement critics of Erasmus's biblical scholarship: the shorter, initial response An Apologia in Response to the Two Invectives of Edward Lee, and the much longer, point-by-point refutation A Response to the Annotations of Edward Lee. Erika Rummel's translation closely follows her Latin edition in the modern critical Opera Omnia (asd). The quarrel with Lee was part of the barrage of controversy provoked by Erasmus's 1516 Greek and Latin New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum, which implicitly challenged the authority of the Latin Vulgate. At the peak of anti-Erasmus sentiment, he was identified as the Antichrist in the pulpit, and conservative theologians, fearful of threats to ecclesiastical and social order, unleashed blasts of criticism that Erasmus unflaggingly countered. Marked by dogmatism, peevishness, and frequent triviality, Lee's attacks are unlikely to garner sympathy with the contemporary reader. While Erasmus's responses are stamped with those rhetorical features that modern enthusiasts perceive as reflecting a distinctive resistance to dogma, proto-Enlightenment rationality, and admirable capacity for toleration, the occasional brusqueness and arrogant dismissals in these particular writings [End Page 401] reveal Erasmus's waspishness in the face of criticism. Despite his attempts to portray himself as an exemplar of moderation, he actively co-ordinated attacks against Lee in print. The dispute between the two men quickly encompassed a number of other humanists and theologians, becoming so impassioned that Lee began fearing that Erasmus's particularly zealous German defenders were threatening his physical welfare. The central contention between the two men was whether or not Erasmus made use of Lee's comments on the Novum Instrumentum when revising it in the 1519 edition. Lee claimed that his Annotationes on Erasmus's work, which he published in 1520, constituted a significant but unacknowledged contribution to Erasmus's biblical labours. Many of Lee's Annotationes focus on Erasmus's own annotations accompanying his New Testament, which defended editorial decisions using philological, patristic, and manuscript evidence. Erasmus's comments on Luke 1:28, in which he suggested that the angel Gabriel approached Mary like a wooer during the Annunciation, outraged Lee, who proclaimed, 'It would have been characteristic of a lover or suitor to address the Virgin by her name first and to use some flattering opening.' Erasmus responded by mocking the English cleric for 'teaching the art of love.' While such complaints on Lee's part may seem comical to the modern reader in their combination of primness and fatuousness, many of his attacks got to the heart of the radical implications of Erasmus's biblical scholarship. After all, Erasmus's philological treatment of Scripture appeared to many as a reduction of the Word of God to the status of literature. Erasmus's disparaging remarks about the apostles' Greek in his note to Acts 10 infuriated Lee: how dare Erasmus suggest that the apostles learned Greek from ordinary human means rather than from the Holy Spirit? Erasmus's historicizing approach to divine revelation and the text of Scripture presented potentially subversive challenges to theology and the status of the Vulgate, and, by extension, the authority of the Catholic church. Erika Rummel's introduction to volume 72 only briefly mentions these issues at the heart of Erasmus's and Lee's disputes, but she has treated the content of the controversy at length in volume 1 of her Erasmus and His Catholic Critics. Instead, volume 72's introduction outlines the chronology of the quarrel, supplies a textual history of the exchanges between the two men, and provides biographical information on Lee. The CWE uses footnotes rather than endnotes, enabling readers to navigate the vast textual network surrounding Erasmian controversy with ease. The volume also contains a helpful index of the biblical passages that Erasmus refers to. Location references at the top of...