Erasmus: his life, works, and influence (review)

SHORT NOTICES Augustijn, Cornells, Erasmus: his life, works, and influence (Erasmus Studies 10), trans. J. C. Grayson, Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 1991; cloth; pp. x, 239; frontispiece plus 20 illustrations; R R P CAN$39.95. This work is likely to become the standard biography of Erasmus for the time being. Since his Erasmus en de Reformatie of 1962 Cornelis Augustijn has been among the front-running Erasmians. This is not to say that his judgments will be accepted as definitive in all cases. For example, on the status of Erasmus' parents at his conception and the authenticity of his purported autobiography, the Compendium vitae, there are strongly argued views (see James McConica, Erasmus, Oxford, 1991). Augustijn is prudent on the vexed issues concerning Erasmus's early life and intellectual development, the influence of the devotio moderna through the Brethren of the C o m m o n Life and of John Colet and his experience of monastic life. Earlier writers have, he believes, exaggerated both influences, but he does not accept the revisionism which would rehabilitate Erasmus's monastic years. H e sees as the central theme of the great humanist's life the search for a reconciliation between Christianity and culture. Biographies of Erasmus in this century have come in groups. In the 1920s Preserved Smith and Johan Huizinga saw Erasmus as the nineteenth-century liberals had seen him, as an Enlightenment kind offigure;although, Huizinga took a sombre view of his personality. The post-war generation of biographers (Margaret M a n n Phillips and Roland Bainton) presented him as an open-hearted and ecumenical Christian, as Bainton's title Erasmus of Christendom indicates. In the last twenty or thirty years, Erasmus the serious religious thinker, biblical scholar and even professional theologian has come to the fore, and some have made an orthodox Catholic figure of him. Augustijn accepts the former move, as thetitlesof his central chapters make clear: 'Christian philosophy', 'The Bible and the Fathers of the Church', 'In the circle of the Biblical humanists'. This Erasmus aimed at 'the renewal of preaching and devotional literature'. However, Augustijn rejects any move to take away the revolutionary thrust in Erasmus. H e wanted to do away with much of the inherited structure, theological and ecclesiastical. This made him popular at the same time and in the same places as Luther and Zwingli. W h e n the crunch came, he prefened religious plurality to civil breakdown or, worse, religious war. Even though Augustijn does not accept Renaudet's view that Erasmus looked for a 'third church', he nevertheless sees some virtue in it. O n the matter of Erasmus's character, where Huizinga influenced generations of readers, he goes some way with his great compatriot but not far. Where 168 Short Notices Huizinga finds 'maidenly coyness', he sees a 'mingling of detachment and involvement'. H e attributes to this character, not Huizinga's faded aestheticism, but toughness, 'undaunted tenacity' and 'restrained passion'. If anything, Augustijn's final emphasis on the 'individualism and spiritualization' of Erasmus's piety undervalues his own evidence for the sociabdity of his outiook. Bruce E. Mansfield Sydney Foss, Clive, History and archaeology of Byzantine Asia Minor, Aldershot, Variorum, 1990; cloth; pp. x, 324; R.R.P. £42.00. Clive Foss is especially associated in the minds of Byzantinists with controversies over die fate of cities in Late Antiquity. What happened to them in the Dark Age of the seventh century? Foss argued in his Harvard doctoral thesis, material from which has formed the basis for more than one book, notably Byzantine and Turkish Sardis (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) and Ephesus after Antiquity (Cambridge, 1979), that the archaeological evidence shows conclusively that the Persian raids of the early 600s in Asia Minor and then the overwhelming incursions of the Arabs less than half a century later left the economies of the ancient cities as shattered as their buildings and that they never regained the scale and dimensions they had enjoyed in late antiquity. Although not everyone has agreed with him, Foss's careful argumentation has refocussed all recent discussions of urban life in middle and late Byzantium, and indeed in the medieval...