Early life Desiderius Erasmus is reported to have been born in Rotterdam on 27 or 28 October ("the vigil of Simon and Jude")[6] in the late 1460s. He was named[note 4] after Erasmus of Formiae, whom Erasmus' father Gerard (Gerardus Helye)[7] personally favored.[8][9] Although as...
As early as 1505, Erasmus wrote to a friend, “I shall sit down to Holy Scripture with my whole heart, and devote the rest of my life to it...[A]ll these three years I have been working entirely at Greek, and have not been playing with it”[4] He began working directly on th...
Related to Desiderius Erasmus:Niccolo Machiavelli ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend: Switch tonew thesaurus Noun1. Desiderius Erasmus- Dutch humanist and theologian who was the leading Renaissance scholar of northern Europe; although his criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church led to the Reformat...
He devoted his adult life to the reform of letters and morals. Northern Europe's standard-bearer for the revival of classical learning begun in Italy a century earlier, Erasmus early on turned his attention to a program for the reform of education. In original works such as De ratione ...