Erasmian Humanism

Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536), arguably the single most influential public intellectual of the sixteenth century, was responsible for the educational and religious reforms that changed European culture in the early modern period and that are in many quarters still with us today. This course will feature the rhetorical assumptions and methods that shaped these reforms with an eye to the commonalities that narrowed the gap between the exercises of the schoolmaster, the efforts of the preacher, and the accomplishments of the literary artist.