Interpretations of Erasmus c.1750-1920: Man on His Own.

Bruce Mansfield. (Erasmus Studies, 11.) Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 12 pls. + x + 512 Pp. $75.

This is the long-awaited sequel to Bruce Mansfield's Phoenix of His Age (reviewed in RQ 34 (Spring 1981): 98-100), a history of the interpretations of Erasmus. The earlier volume reached to the mid-eighteenth century and to the first major critical biographies of Knight, Jortin, and Burigny. This volume picks up as the Enlightenment gives way to late eighteenth-century Romanticism and carries the story of Erasmus' reputation into the early twentieth century.

In the late eighteenth century the interpretations of Erasmus continued to be shaped by such large social and intellectual movements as Romanticism and the Age of Revolution rather than by "advances in the scholarship" of his biography (11). Whereas the Enlightenment had tended to admire Erasmus, albeit somewhat uncritically, with the end of the Enlightenment and the coming of the French Revolution "the history of Erasmus' reputation was entering a new and problematical stage" (68).

The focus of much of the interpretation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been not so much on Erasmus as an historical figure as on Erasmus as a representative figure of the Reformation. The Reformation continued to be a matter of fundamental interest to scholars of this period and, indeed, nearly all those who wrote about Erasmus were professional clergy or true believers. The litmus test Mansfield applies through most of the nineteenth-century interpretations is that of the comparison of Erasmus to Luther--usually to the disadvantage of Erasmus.

With part two, "The Nineteenth Century and After," the dominant character of European thought became a passionate nationalism with which Erasmus' dispassionate internationalism and passionate pacifism were at odds. But at the same time there flourished a sense of toleration and a freer spirit that often saw Erasmus as its own predecessor. Mark Pettison, for example, commented that his Greek New Testament ". . . contributed more to the liberation of the human spirit from the thraldom of the clergy than all the uproar and rage of Luther's many pamphlets" (162).

The most important chapter in the book is chapter 11, "Into the Twentieth Century," for it is only here that we get a truly historical Erasmus, based, more than anything else, on the great Allen edition of the correspondence and the parallel work in recovering "the real world (domestic, social, and political) he inhabited" (298). But Allen is the key.

Like its predecessor volume, this one is a difficult and demanding book that will be of value mainly to specialists. It asks of its readers not only considerable knowledge of Erasmus but a detailed and subtle understanding of European intellectual history. The notes and bibliography clearly indicate Mansfield's mastery of this history.

One might dispute the importance the author assigns to Coleridge and Kerker. But these are matters of interpretation. On balance, Man on His Own is an excellent book. It is to be hoped that a third volume will deal with the tangled thicket of Erasmian interpretation across the balance of the twentieth century.