Abstract
Abstract This Margaret Mann Phillips lecture of 2018 examines Erasmus’s relationships with his amanuenses, building on the work of Franz Bierlaire (1968) and others. It especially considers when and why members of Erasmus’s familia appeared in print in his works. Mention of servants functioned in a variety of ways to allay the author’s responsibility for features of the text that might be criticized. Manuscript evidence also shows Erasmus working with his amanuenses in the preparation of publications and indexes in particular.
Highlights
By combing through the correspondence and adducing some other sources Bierlaire offered a nuanced portrait of Erasmus as a paterfamilias, the head of a household with neither wife nor children (Erasmus remained a cleric and celibate though he was released from his monastic vows), but a bustling one comprising a female housekeeper (Margarete Büsslin, from 1522 to 1536) and multiple young men who lived with Erasmus to study with and help him
They were a crucial source of labor, some of which we might consider mechanical, but much of which required a good education and personal judgment as Erasmus acknowledged from time to time
Erasmus cultivated a large network of correspondents, but his republic of letters started at home, with members of his household, who learned there the habitus of the humanist scholar and helped to spread Erasmus’s values and reputation in their further careers
Summary
Wilhelm Nesen for example, who had published attacks against the conservative Catholics of Louvain, was tapped to write a letter to Amerbach wondering who the author of the Julius exclusus might be (even though they both knew it was Erasmus)—Silvana Seidel Menchi has beautifully pointed out how this kind of “double register letter” was meant to be leaked to others to deflect attention from Erasmus in the hunt for the author of this daring satire.[50] And Erasmus enlisted others to block access to printers to his enemies (like Lee), or to leak information about upcoming publications so that he could respond to them as they appeared (e.g. in the case of the Hyperaspistes against Luther).[51]
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