It was completed with the generous collaboration of numerous Italian humanists, as gratefully recorded in the adage Festina lente.

In Venice,Erasmus worked with the humanist printer Aldus Manutius to publishthe first great collection of adages, the Adagiorum Chiliades in 1508. He embarked in 1506 on a long awaited voyage to Italy. After further itineracy in France and the Low Countries, he returned to England, where he was the guest of Thomas More, with whom he collaborated on a translation of selected dialogues by Lucian of Samosata. Erasmus returned to Paris in 1500 to publish his first collection of proverbs, the Adagiorum Collectanea, whose dedicatory epistle, addressed to Mountjoy, remains a crucial statement of Erasmian poetics. This first English sojourn, though brief, proved crucial to Erasmus’ subsequent career since it was during this visit that he became acquainted with Thomas More and John Colet, founder of St. It was in Paris that Erasmus became attached to his first important patron, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, whom he accompanied to England as tutor in 1499. In this context he founded an ethics of speech to guide himself and others to what he regarded as the true love of wisdom. He did so by propounding his philosophy of Christ, which displays some affinities for prior traditions including Platonism and Epicureanism, but which depends primarily on the understanding that philosophy is not an exclusive university discipline, but rather a moral obligation incumbent upon all believers. Perhaps Erasmus’ most important role in the history of philosophy is to have challenged and expanded the disciplinary boundaries of the field. In fact, his profound contempt for the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance puts him at odds with the institution of philosophy.

He was not a systematic thinker, and he did not found a system or school of philosophy. He was perhaps above all renowned and repudiated for his work on the Christian New Testament. Erasmus was an indefatigable correspondent, controversialist, self-publicist, satirist, translator, commentator, editor, and provocateur of Renaissance culture. His main activity was to write letters to the leading statesmen, humanists, printers, and theologians of the first three and a half decades of the sixteenth century. Desiderius Erasmus was one of the leading activists and thinkers of the European Renaissance.

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