Inspired by a recent post by derfner, I’ve been reading Erasmus’ letters. His Latin is fluent and fairly easy to follow, and his style is lively and charming. I’ve been using G.S. Facer’s Erasmus and His Times (a reasonably priced Bolchazy-Carducci reprint, some of it available online). It has a good selection of letters, contextualized and each one prefaced by an excellent English précis of its contents. And naturally the letters have a great deal of intrinsic interest.
I highly recommend it to anyone learning Latin, whether for reading or for speaking.
As a body of informal correspondence by a foremost figure of his day it’s second only to Cicero’s. It’s not purely classical, but none the worse for that, and close enough.
Thanks, Michael!
I went ahead and ordered a copy from Abebooks. It’s a Bristol Press edition, so I’m not expecting a high quality print job, but being a Latin typeface it’s not so much an impediment to reading as Bristol’s Greek reprints. I can’t imagine a more eloquent representative of his time than Erasmus, so his letters should serve as a excellent window to that period.
I wholeheartedly agree with this recommendation! Besides the letters, the colloquia of Erasmus are a real delight to read. These (and many other colloquia) can be found online:
On YouTube there is a (Latin) talk by Terence Tunberg about the usefulness of Erasmus in the Latin classroom. His recommendations should be useful to any self-learner or Latin enthusiast, too.
Erasmus’ letters are great, I read many of them a couple of years ago. I especially remember a rather long letter, in which he narrates an awful trip he made while being ill.
Laurentius Mons, Shenoute, Many thanks for the tips and the links. For now I’m just reading Facer’s selection (I didn’t know of Allen’s), and only intermittently, but I do want to explore further.
Yes he always seems to be ill, and to be moving from place to place to avoid plague hotspots. Unhealthy times, and without vaccines.
I listened to the Tunberg talk (which I was pleased to find I could understand by ear), and was glad that he too paired Erasmus and Cicero just as I did, only I fastened on their letters rather than the moral pabulum that Tunberg commends. (Yawn. Seneca is so much better.) It’s great to have these two corpora of informal correspondence by two of the leading lights of their respective ages. We don’t have anything comparable in Greek.
I read Erasmus years ago in that very same edition! It really is quite lovely. I’m trying to remember now what happened in the first excerpt, something about his landlady fighting with the maid or him and the maid overhearing the landlady or something.
Must revisit.
Agree that it is a very useful volume. I wonder if it the Latin Library has a nice clean ePub of his letters and dialogues actually…