Erasmus of the Low Countries.

James D. Tracy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. viii+ 297 pp. $40. ISBN 0-520-08745-3

Kathy Eden. Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception. (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics.) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. viii+ 120pp. $20. ISBN 0-300-06694-5

The title distinguishes this portrayal from the familiar Erasmus of Christendom in a book the author is uniquely qualified to write as an accomplished historian of both Erasmus and Burgundy. Its initial sentence asserts the enduring importance of Erasmus to the ideal of critical scholarship. Tracy understands well that this critical scholarship was not dispassionate but directed. It is the contexts in which Erasmus formulated and advocated such learning that the book elucidates. Thematic is social reform through educational reform as the essence of a humanism that harmonized classical knowledge and Christian virtue.

Tracy aims "to understand Erasmus on his own terms" (2). In the traditional conviction that an author can be understood if the assumptions for a sensible interpretation can be reconstructed, he situates and evaluates Erasmus within three contexts: as a Burgundian, as a humanist and ecclesiastic, and as a controversialist. These contexts coincide with the years 1469-1511, 1511-1522, and 1521-1536. Explicating the first stage, Tracy argues that Erasmus opposed norms quintessential to the Low Countries by shifting to the classicizing norms of Italian humanism. The advanced economy of an urbanized Low Countries had promoted the political development of representative government. Erasmuss ideal of a commonwealth of the learned and pious laity reacted against the corporatist organization, civil and religious, of that highly urbanized society. Erasmus proposed, rather, an individualism. Tracy relates this to the political polarity between the guilds and the civil society, with their different values of organized labor and legal equality. In his advocacy of an individual piety Erasmus advocated the latter. Indeed, "his heart and his greatest effectiveness lay in propagating the idea of a Christian civility" (51). This is the most original contribution of the book, since, as Tracy modestly mentions in a footnote, knowledge of that local history has largely been confined to its locality.

Although the succeeding arguments are more familiar, they present the familiar with textual documentation and personal understanding. The second part concentrates on Erasmus's famous and influential evangelical humanism. Tracy explains him in relation to three other reformers - Valla, Vives, and Calvin - then in relation to his opponents. These obscurantists - princes, popes, Jews, but especially "mendicant tyrants" - Erasmus tended to typify as fomenters of evil, entrapping the populace in superstitious ceremony rather than liberating them spiritually. (One misunderstanding: the Augustinian Canons Regular, in which religious order Erasmus vowed, were not "monks.") The third part concerns his apologetics toward Catholic critics and Protestant reformers. Although Erasmus's position(s) on the important controversy about moral freedom of choice is a landmine, Tracy guides the reader through it to the safe ground by emphasizing the nondogmatic nature of his deliberation. Citation of Erasmus's personal opinion, despite his valuation of an ecclesiastical consensus, would have been useful, however, because the definitive texts (Hyperaspistes, LB 10:1257E-F; Diatriba, 9:1224B-C, 1244B-C, 1247D) counteract, or at least complicate, caricatures of him as an optimistic proponent of freedom of choice. But Tracy's account is suitable enough for a biography rather than a theology. He concludes among the confessionalists vs. the concordists, with Polish reception as a case study. Erasmus was a "circumspect reformer" (182), uniting two traits more usually separated, thus occasioning an ambiguity that infuriated contemporaries but a subtlety that engages moderns.

Erasmus of the Low Countries is well structured, clearly and concisely written. It is a learned and thoughtful book, free of ideology, that exceeds its aim of a sensible interpretation. Although there is no substitute for reading Erasmus, if a reliable biography to situate that reading in its contexts is wanted, then this is the volume of choice.

Critical scholarship is the subject of Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition. It argues that hermeneutics is not a modern invention but a classical theory and practice that established principles of meaning, context, and economy. Eden traces this tradition from Republican Rome to Reformation Germany. Her explication of its classical basis in adversarial argumentation, especially the forensic rhetoric of the courts and manuals, is lucid. She discerns importantly a relation between principles of interpreting texts and arguments for equitable judgment. Since equity was a mitigating corrective to the generality, thus rigidity, inherent in law, there developed a flexible measure against legal statute by investigating intention, which could accommodate an individual. This tendency from words to intention was paralleled by one from letter to spirit, so that the equitable and the spiritual became equated.

Eden explains how intentionality related to rhetorical invention while signification related to elocution. Ambiguity in texts resided in the words, as diverse in meaning, not in the discrepancy between the written words and the author's intention. The advocate of intention thus claimed for equity. She also discusses context, both historical and textual. Interpretation of the historical constituted the rhetorical principle of decorum, while that of the textual relied on the philosophical principle of economy. Intentionality allied with a wholeness perceived in history and in text. Equity and ethics paralleled economy and formality.

Eden demonstrates how patristic, then humanist, interpretation developed and revised the Ciceronian formulation. The treatment of humanist hermeneutics - in Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Flacius - will be familiar to scholars but still useful. The summary of Erasmus's hermeneutics is excellent, although there is precedent publication for it as historicist. The value of this book for specialists is in its expert excavation of the classical foundations, with documentation and argumentation certain to stimulate research on their Renaissance inheritance.

MARJORIE O'ROURKE BOYLE Toronto, Ontario, Canada