Abstract

Erasmus was a precursor of the modern intellectual and in him we can see many aspects of a slowly emerging modern consensus that takes form in the Enlightenment. We can turn back to him and see the way humanism concealed its flaws and prejudices, and indeed may still be doing so. This book is an exercise not in sitting judgment on the past so much as trying to read Erasmus’s texts in a way that reveals problems in our own readings and mode of inheriting the past. It is not about dethroning Erasmus, but trying to examine his unawareness and asking how an intelligent and questioning intellectual could not see prejudices or flaws in his own writing. Erasmus is a special case in the way that his conventional thinking and his unconventional thinking operated together. For he was a radical figure in the way he challenged the status quo, and at the same time a remarkably conventional figure in the tradition we have inherited.