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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 arrangement 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 considerable 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 convenient 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
