Part 1 (2/2)

Whatever was co up in Holland flowered unseen; it was not of a sort to attract the attention of Christendoation and trade, an to eht theland and Scotland, Scandinavia, North Ger fishery, a hu industry, shared by a number of small towns

Not one of those towns in Holland and Zealand, neither Dordrecht nor Leyden, Haarlees, Lille, Antwerp or Brussels in the south It is true that in the towns of Holland also the highest products of the huerminated, but those towns themselves were still too small and too poor to be centres of art and science The reat foci of secular and ecclesiastical culture sluter, the great sculptor, went to Burgundy, took service with the dukes, and bequeathed no specimen of his art to the land of his birth Dirk Bouts, the artist of Haarlem, removed to Louvain, where his best work is preserved; as left at Haarlem has perished At Haarlem, too, and earlier, perhaps, than anywhere else, obscure experiht forth, which was to change the world: the art of printing

There was yet another characteristic spiritual phenoave its peculiar staned to give depth and fervour to religious life; started by a burgher of Deventer, Geert Groote, toward the end of the fourteenth century It had embodied itself in two closely connected forms--the fraterhouses, where the brethren of the Co froation of the ustinian canons Originating in the regions on the banks of the Ysel, between the two small towns of Deventer and Zwolle, and so on the outskirts of the diocese of Utrecht, this moveen and the Frisian country, ard to Holland proper Fraterhouses were erected everywhere and ation were established or affiliated The movement was spoken of as 'modern devotion', _devotio moderna_ It was rather a matter of sentiment and practice than of definite doctrine The truly Catholic character of the ed by the church authorities Sincerity and modesty, simplicity and industry, and, above all, constant ardour of religious eies were devoted to tending the sick and other works of charity, but especially to instruction and the art of writing

It is in this that it especially differed from the revival of the Franciscan and Dominican orders of about the sa The Windesheimians and the Hieronymians (as the brethren of the Co activities in the seclusion of the schoolroo cell The schools of the brethren soon drew pupils from a wide area In this way the foundations were laid, both here in the northern Netherlands and in lower Ger the middle classes; a culture of a very narrow, strictly ecclesiastical nature, indeed, but which for that very reason was fit to permeate broad layers of the people

What the Windesheimians themselves produced in the way of devotional literature is chiefly liraphies of their own uished rather by their pious tenor and sincerity than by daring or novel thoughts

But of thereatest was that i, near Zwolle, the _Iions north of the Scheldt and the Meuse laughed at the rudeof the inhabitants, but they also mentioned their sincere piety These countries were already, what they have ever remained, somewhat conte on the world and for reproving it than for astonishi+ng it with dazzling wit

Rotterdam and Gouda, situated upward of twelve ion of Holland, an extre the first towns of the county They were s after Dordrecht, Haarle Amsterdam They were not centres of culture Erasmus was born at Rotterdaitimacy of his birth has thrown a veil of mystery over his descent and kinshi+p It is possible that Eras into the world only in his later years Acutely sensitive to the taint in his origin, he did more to veil the secret than to reveal it The picture which he painted of it in his ripe age was ro hter, in the hope offellow, indignant, tried to persuade hi man fled before the child was born He went to Ro His relations sent hirief he becaether Returned to his native country he discovered the deceit He abstained froer ive his son a liberal education

The mother continued to care for the child, till an early death took her frorave To Erasmus's recollection he was only twelve or thirteen years old when his mother died It seems to be practically certain that her death did not occur before 1483, when, therefore, he was already seventeen years old His sense of chronology was always remarkably ill developed

Unfortunately it is beyond doubt that Erasmus himself knew, or had known, that not all particulars of this version were correct In all probability his father was already a priest at the time of the relationshi+p to which he owed his life; in any case it was not the iular alliance of long standing, of which a brother, Peter, had been born three years before

We can only vaguely discern the outlines of a numerous and commonplace middle-class family The father had nine brothers, ere all randparents on his father's side and the uncles on his e that a host of cousins--their progeny--has not boasted of a fareat Erasmus Their descendants have not even been traced What were their naher circles fa but fixed, makes it difficult to trace Erasmus's kinsmen Usually people were called by their own and their father's name; but it also happened that the father's naeneration Erasmus calls his father Gerard, his brother Peter Gerard, while a papal letter styles Eraserii Possibly the father was called Roger Gerard or Gerards

Although Erasmus and his brother were born at Rotterdam, there is much that points to the fact that his father's kin did not belong there, but at Gouda At any rate they had near relatives at Gouda

Erase in the choice, although it was rather unusual St Erasmus was one of the fourteen Holy Martyrs, whose worshi+p so rossed the attention of the multitude in the fifteenth century Perhaps the popular belief that the intercession of St Eras the name Up to the time when he became better acquainted with Greek, he used the foriven that name the more correct and melodious form Erasmius On a few occasions he half jocularly called himself so, and his Godchild, Johannes Froben's son, always used this form

It was probably for similar aesthetic considerations that he soon altered the barbaric Rotterdammensis to Roterdamus, later Roterodamus, which he perhaps accentuated as a proparoxytone Desiderius was an addition selected by himself, which he first used in 1496; it is possible that the study of his favourite author Jeroested the name to him When, therefore, the full form, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodaia_, published by Josse Badius at Paris in 1506, it is an indication that Erase, had found himself

Circumstances had not made it easy for him to find his way Almost in his infancy, when hardly four years old, he thinks, he had been put to school at Gouda, together with his brother He was nine years old when his father sent him to Deventer to continue his studies in the famous school of the chapter of St Lebuin His mother accompanied him His stay at Deventerwhich he was a choir boy in the minster at Utrecht, from 1475 to 1484 Erasmus's explicit declaration that he was fourteen years old when he left Deventerthat in later years he confused his temporary absence from Deventer (when at Utrecht) with the definite end of his stay at Deventer Reminiscences of his life there repeatedly crop up in Erasot inspired hiratitude; the school was still barbaric, then, he said; ancient medieval text-books were used there of whose silliness and cumbrousness we can hardly conceive Some of the masters were of the brotherhood of the Coht to his task a certain degree of understanding of classic antiquity in its purer forius was placed at the head of the school, a friend of the Frisian huaped at by his coy On festal days, when the rector ius; on one single occasion he listened to the celebrated Agricola himself, which left a deep iue that ravaged the town brought Erasmus's school-time at Deventer to a sudden close His father called him and his brother back to Gouda, only to die himself soon afterwards He must have been a man of culture For he knew Greek, had heard the famous humanists in Italy, had copied classic authors and left a library of some value

Erasuardians whose care and intentions he afterwards placed in an unfavourable light

How far he exaggerated their treatuardians, a whom one Peter Winckel, schoolmaster at Gouda, occupied the principal place, had little sympathy with the new classicism, about which their ward already felt enthusiastic, need not be doubted 'If you should write again so elegantly, please to add a coly to an epistle on which Erasmus, then fourteen years old, had expended uardians sincerely considered it a work pleasing to God to persuade the youths to enter a monastery can no more be doubted than that this was for theet rid of their task For Erasrossly selfish atteether reprehensible abuse of power and authority More than this: in later years it obscured for hie of his own brother, hom he had been on ter felloenty-one and eighteen years old, to school again, this time at Bois-le-Duc There they lived in the Fraterhouse itself, to which the school was attached There was nothing here of the glory that had shone about Deventer The brethren, says Eras all natural gifts, with blows, reprimands and severity, in order to fit the soul for the uardians were aih ripe for the university they were deliberately kept away from it In this way more than two years asted

One of his twoErasmus, tried hard to prevail on him to join the brethren of the Coretted that he had not yielded; for the brethren took no such irrevocable vows as were now in store for hiue became the occasion for the brothers to leave Bois-le-Duc and return to Gouda Erasmus was attacked by a fever that sapped his power of resistance, of which he now stood in such need The guardians (one of the three had died in theood cause for it, as they had ill administered the slender fortune of their wards, and, says Eras connected with this dark period of his life in the loomy colours--except himself Himself he sees as a boy of not yet sixteen years (it is nearly certain that he must have been twenty already) weakened by fever, but nevertheless resolute and sensible in refusing

He has persuaded his brother to fly with hiuardian is a narrow-minded tyrant, the other, Winckel's brother, a merchant, a frivolous coaxer Peter, the elder of the youths, yields first and enters the ustinian canons), where the guardian had found a place for hier Only after a visit to theto the same order, where he found a schoolfellow froht side of monastic life, did Erasmus yield and enter Steyn, where soon after, probably in 1488, he took the vows