Page 10 [10]
Vi PREFACE
courtesy of his executors; Madame Reich has kindly enabled
me to acquire the valuable collections of notes formed by her
husband; and Mr. Nichols has from the first given me the
full benefit of his ripe judgement and detailed study of
the ground in which I have been allowed to glean after him.
The requirements under which a new edition should be
carried out have long been clearly indicated. The arrange¬
ment which Erasmus rejected whilst his letters could be
regarded mainly as literature, has become necessary now
that they are recognized as one of the best sources for the
history of his age. Amongst them it was his own wish
that the prefaces should be included which he wrote for his
numerous works; and there is further reason for doing so,
inasmuch as the dates appended to them sometimes supply
valuable indications as to his movements, and also since it
was the practice of the early Renaissance to insert in prefaces
personal details which make them often sources of consider¬
able importance for information about the persons concerned.
The commentary is intended to explain the dates assigned to
the letters and incidentally to trace the course of Erasmus’
life; whilst biographical notes are added which vary in
inverse proportion to the fame of the persons mentioned and
to their treatment in dictionaries of biography, some regard
also being paid to the closeness of their relation to Erasmus.
But even with many well-known names I have inserted some
fullness of detail to illustrate their position at the particular
time; and also with the idea that the correspondence of a
man to whom letters came from homes princely and obscure
in every part of Europe, may serve some purpose as a con¬
venient work of reference for this period. In naming
Erasmus’ correspondents I have found myself in a continual
difficulty, and have arrived at no satisfactory conclusion.
To use the Latin forms of names would have made uniformity
attainable; but in a book so much of which is in English
it would have been impossible to speak of Ioannes Coletus,
Gulielmus Latimerus, Morus, &. On the other hand, in
treating of an age which freely discarded the vernacular it
would not have been humane to let Beatus Rhenanus appear
as Beat Rynower. I have adopted the principle, therefore,
of giving the name of a correspondent in the vernacular,
when it first occurs at the head of a letter, and afterwards