Erasmus and the Age of Reformation | Page 5

seems to be practically certain that her death did not occur
before 1483, when, therefore, he was already seventeen years old. His
sense of chronology was always remarkably ill developed.
Unfortunately it is beyond doubt that Erasmus himself knew, or had

known, that not all particulars of this version were correct. In all
probability his father was already a priest at the time of the relationship
to which he owed his life; in any case it was not the impatience of a
betrothed couple, but an irregular alliance of long standing, of which a
brother, Peter, had been born three years before.
We can only vaguely discern the outlines of a numerous and
commonplace middle-class family. The father had nine brothers, who
were all married. The grandparents on his father's side and the uncles
on his mother's side attained to a very great age. It is strange that a host
of cousins--their progeny--has not boasted of a family connection with
the great Erasmus. Their descendants have not even been traced. What
were their names? The fact that in burgher circles family names had, as
yet, become anything but fixed, makes it difficult to trace Erasmus's
kinsmen. Usually people were called by their own and their father's
name; but it also happened that the father's name became fixed and
adhered to the following generation. Erasmus calls his father Gerard,
his brother Peter Gerard, while a papal letter styles Erasmus himself
Erasmus Rogerii. Possibly the father was called Roger Gerard or
Gerards.
Although Erasmus and his brother were born at Rotterdam, there is
much that points to the fact that his father's kin did not belong there,
but at Gouda. At any rate they had near relatives at Gouda.
Erasmus was his Christian name. There is nothing strange in the choice,
although it was rather unusual. St. Erasmus was one of the fourteen
Holy Martyrs, whose worship so much engrossed the attention of the
multitude in the fifteenth century. Perhaps the popular belief that the
intercession of St. Erasmus conferred wealth, had some weight in
choosing the name. Up to the time when he became better acquainted
with Greek, he used the form Herasmus. Later on he regretted that he
had not also given that name the more correct and melodious form
Erasmius. On a few occasions he half jocularly called himself so, and
his godchild, Johannes Froben's son, always used this form.
It was probably for similar aesthetic considerations that he soon altered
the barbaric Rotterdammensis to Roterdamus, later Roterodamus,

which he perhaps accentuated as a proparoxytone. Desiderius was an
addition selected by himself, which he first used in 1496; it is possible
that the study of his favourite author Jerome, among whose
correspondents there is a Desiderius, suggested the name to him. When,
therefore, the full form, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, first appears,
in the second edition of the Adagia, published by Josse Badius at Paris
in 1506, it is an indication that Erasmus, then forty years of age, had
found himself.
Circumstances had not made it easy for him to find his way. Almost in
his infancy, when hardly four years old, he thinks, he had been put to
school at Gouda, together with his brother. He was nine years old when
his father sent him to Deventer to continue his studies in the famous
school of the chapter of St. Lebuin. His mother accompanied him. His
stay at Deventer must have lasted, with an interval during which he was
a choir boy in the minster at Utrecht, from 1475 to 1484. Erasmus's
explicit declaration that he was fourteen years old when he left
Deventer may be explained by assuming that in later years he confused
his temporary absence from Deventer (when at Utrecht) with the
definite end of his stay at Deventer. Reminiscences of his life there
repeatedly crop up in Erasmus's writings. Those concerning the
teaching he got inspired him with little gratitude; the school was still
barbaric, then, he said; ancient medieval text-books were used there of
whose silliness and cumbrousness we can hardly conceive. Some of the
masters were of the brotherhood of the Common Life. One of them,
Johannes Synthen, brought to his task a certain degree of understanding
of classic antiquity in its purer form. Toward the end of Erasmus's
residence Alexander Hegius was placed at the head of the school, a
friend of the Frisian humanist, Rudolf Agricola, who on his return from
Italy was gaped at by his compatriots as a prodigy. On festal days,
when the rector made his oration before all the pupils, Erasmus heard
Hegius; on one single occasion he listened to the celebrated Agricola
himself, which left a deep impression on his mind.
His mother's death of the plague that ravaged the town brought
Erasmus's school-time at Deventer to a