The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 61, Patristic Scholarship: The Edition of St. Jerome.

Desiderius Erasmus. James F. Brady and John C. Olin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. 14 pls. + xxxvii +293 pp. $85.

The editors of the volume under review have executed with credit a difficult assignment. None of the Latin collections of Erasmus' writing, including ASD, contain his edition of St. Jerome, and this volume is the first in English to attempt to convey the character of Erasmus' enterprise. So corrupt was the text that Erasmus declared it cost Jerome less trouble to write the books than it had cost Erasmus to edit them (190). In fact he thought that if Jerome appeared in the sixteenth century as an editor and had to work with the manuscripts Erasmus had at his disposal, the saint himself could not have restored completely his own original text.

Herein lies the difficulty with an edition in English. Erasmus' contribution to the nine-volume 1516 edition of Jerome runs to four large closely-printed folio volumes, of which the editors could include only a small sample. And of course the series of the Collected Works of Erasmus in English, of which this is Volume 61, envisions a reader whose English is stronger than his Latin. Nevertheless the achievement on which Erasmus most vaunts himself is precisely his flair in matters of style (see the excellent chapter on Erasmus' Jerome in Eugene Rice's Saint Jerome in the Renaissance, 1985). Erasmus describes himself as alert to "anything that does not sound like a true and genuine reading" (8; amplified on 76), but the reader of a translation has no means of deciding for himself how successful Erasmus was. The editors therefore devote much of their space to Erasmus' programmatical prefaces. The reader learns from them what Erasmus says he is going to do, but he does not have anything like the same opportunity to see Erasmus actually doing it. Prefaces, however eloquent, are only curtain-raisers, and one would have been grateful to have them followed by examples of corrupt passages that Erasmus had cleaned up radically by the application of philological criteria. Yet the editors apparently decided that to gather such passages would be to go beyond their assignment--Erasmus in English. For the same reason the translation of Erasmus notes is often abridged when the discussion turns on matters of Latinity.

Both Jerome and Erasmus were conscious stylists, but the presentation six of Jerome's letters in translation provokes strong stylistic dissonances. Jerome appears in the version by W.H. Fremantle (1893), executed in the soothing mandarin prose that characterized that distant day, and when Fremantle's Jerome quotes Scripture he quotes it in the Authorized Version. By contrast, Erasmus speaks the more rugged idiom of today. Sometimes plainness is an advantage, as when Erasmus declares that the difference between Scotus' style and that of William of Occam is about like "the difference between one broom and another broom" (77), or in Erasmus' slam-bang attack on Jerome's critics (51-53). Occasionally, however, the translator himself loses interest: "So it was the mind of Christ that the valour of a famous soldier when aroused by innumerable attacks begin to shine forth more brilliantly and that like gold proved by fire, tried by endless adversity, he move through good fortune and ill towards the prize of immortality" (46). The volume offers also, for the first time in English, the life of Jerome that Erasmus prepared for the 1516 edition; the editors candidly consider it "the most important selection in this volume" (xxiv).

After this interesting sample of Erasmus' Jerome, perhaps University of Toronto Press might consider a separate "Companion Volume" covering all Erasmus' patristic scholarship along the lines of Jaroslav Pelikan's masterly Luther the Expositor (1959), "Companion Volume" to the English translation of Luther's exegesis.