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Document Details : Title: Erasmus and the Latin Deficit in Leuven Subtitle: The 16th Jozef IJsewijn Lecture Author(s): MACPHAIL, Eric Journal: Humanistica Lovaniensia Volume: 74 Date: 2025 Pages: 185-197 DOI: 10.2143/HLO.74.0.3294849 Abstract : Now the hotbed and very epicenter of Neo-Latin studies, Leuven once suffered from a deplorable Latin deficit in the age, or at least in the eyes, of Erasmus. Many have studied the numerous quarrels that broke out between Erasmus and the Leuven theologians around 1520, and these quarrels are usually understood in the context of humanism vs. scholasticism or philology vs. theology. A more helpful context might be the phenomenon that Ann Moss called 'the Latin language turn'. This paper proposes to study one particular quarrel, between Erasmus and Jan Briart of Ath, from the vantage point of Erasmus’ Apologia pro declamatione in laude matrimonii (1519) and his correspondence from his time in Leuven. To an accusation of heresy for infringement of monastic values, Erasmus responds with an argument centered on Latin lexicography. Curiously, in 1533, facing his own challenge from the Leuven theologians, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa uses the same tactics and the same arguments as Erasmus did, deploying these arguments as a matter of fact rather than of dispute, to defend his De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium. What does it mean to displace a controversy from the ground of religious orthodoxy to the very different arbiter of linguistic usage and meaning? When Erasmus appeals to the dictionary against the church, does he affirm a new or renewed kind of orthodoxy? These are some of the questions this paper asks, if not answers. |
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