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  • Erasmus’s Controversies
  • Chris L. Heesakkers (bio)
Controversies: Responsio ad epistolam paraeneticam Alberti Pii. Apologia adversus rhapsodias Alberti Pii. Brevissima scholia. By Desiderius Erasmus. Edited by Nelson H. Minnich; translated by Daniel J. Sheerin; annotated by Nelson H. MinnichDaniel J. Sheerin. [Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 84.] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2005. Pp. cxlviii, 483. $184.00. ISBN 978-0-802-04397-6.)

The last volume of the English translation of Erasmus’s controversies is an impressive historical and philological achievement. It contains Erasmus’s complete contribution to the controversy—that is, the three works mentioned in the title, Responsio, Apologia, and Scholia—and also, in the introduction (pp. xliv–xlvii), Erasmus’s letter of October 10, 1525 (Allen, Epist. 1634), which had elicited the controversy, instead of stopping the criticism on Erasmus that Pio was ventilating in the circles of the papal Curia. An extensive and well-documented introduction precedes this corpus of Erasmus’s texts and offers new viewpoints on some aspects of Pio’s intellectual education and his studies (pp. xvii–xxv), which Erasmus seems to have underestimated. (Pio’s later defender Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda will explicitly blame Erasmus for his depreciation of Pio’s studies in the last years of his life; cf. his Antapologia, chaps. 13–14). After reading the description of the close link between Erasmus’s adversary and the Franciscan order that counted Pio’s brother and sister among its members (p. xvii), the reader will wonder whether Erasmus had ever been aware of the real importance of Pio’s relationship with the Franciscans. This puts Pio’s connections with the Franciscans in Paris and his burial in their church in another light.

The section on Pio’s diplomatic career (pp. xxv–xxxvi) makes clear that Pio’s relations with the Vatican were also closer than Erasmus assumed. The prestige Pio already had during the pontificate of Julius II (pp. xxv–xxvi) was enhanced during that of the Medici Pope Leo X, when Pio married Cecilia [End Page 79] Orsini and entered, in that way, into the mighty Roman Orsini family, which at that moment counted four cardinals (p. xxxiii). After the short intermezzo of Pope Adrian VI—closely related to his former pupil, the Emperor Charles V—another Medici cardinal mounted the papal throne as Clement VII, a former patron of Erasmus’s deeply mistrusted former friend Girolamo Aleander. Erasmus maintained an ambiguous relationship with those two Italian ecclesiastical dignitaries.

Other interesting sections of the introduction are devoted to a French translation of Pio’s Responsio, dedicated to the nobleman Guillaume de Montmorency, and an adaptation of it, dedicated by Montmorency to King Francis I, both extant in manuscript only (pp. lx–lxiii, cxi–cxv, cxxxiii–cxxxiv), and to the Spanish translation of Pio’s Tres et viginti libri, published in Alcalá de Henares in the year of Erasmus’s death, 1536 (pp. cxv–cxix). Since Pio’s last book included the preceding documents of the controversy, from Erasmus’s letter of October 10, 1525, onward, the Spanish translation includes Erasmus’s letter and his Responsio, with Pio’s extensive marginal notes. The suppression of this book as a whole had already been described by Marcel Bataillon. The French translation of Pio’s Responsio is illustrative for the high social status of the author in Paris. The frontispiece of the copy devoted to Francis I (reproduced in black and white, p. cxii) shows Montmorency “presenting Pio in a teaching pose to the enthroned king.” The critical edition of Pio’s Responsio by Fabio Forner (Firenze, 2002, p. xxxiv) does not mention this copy of the French translation.

The section “Pio’s Death and Funeral and Erasmus’ Mockery of Them” (pp. lxxxviii–xcviii) offers most interesting details and is very useful as background information for Erasmus’s colloquy Exequiae Seraphicae. Part of those details stem from Pio’s last will. The editors emphasize the exceptional value of this document by generously adding a complete annotated English translation of it, accompanied by two illustrations (pp. 387–404). Some readers may find themselves wishing for a bilingual edition, although length may have been a concern for the editor.

Considering the continuous...

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