Alpha Book

Greek was first taught
both in England and in France about the middle of the fifteenth
century. The Italian expeditions of the French kings Charles VIII,
Louis XII, and Francis I, 1494-1547, served to familiarize Frenchmen
with humanism. And the rise of important new German universities called
humanists to the Holy Roman Empire. As has been said, humanism
dominated all Christian Europe in the sixteenth century.
[Sidenote: Erasmus, Chief Humanist of the Sixteenth Century]
Towering above all his contemporaries was Erasmus, the foremost
humanist and the intellectual arbiter of the sixteenth century. Erasmus
(1466-1536) was a native of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, but
throughout a long and studious life he lived in Germany, France,
England, Italy, and Switzerland. He took holy orders in the Church and
secured the degree of doctor of sacred theology, but it was as a lover
of books and a prolific writer that he earned his title to fame.
Erasmus, to an even greater degree than Petrarch, became a great
international figure--the scholar of Europe.


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