The Oxford Reformers: John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More

The monks of Cologne were disappointed. Erasmus did not die. His illness turned out not to be the plague. After four weeks’ nursing at the good printer’s house, he was well enou...

To appreciate the full significance of Colet’s lectures, it is needful to bear in mind what was the current opinion of the scholastic divines of the period concerning the Script...

While the work of Erasmus had for some years past lain chiefly in the direction of laborious literary study, it had been far otherwise with More. His lines had fallen among the...

Colet, left alone to pursue the even tenor of his way at Oxford, worked steadily at his post. It mattered little to him that for years he toiled on without any official recognit...

In the spring or summer of 1498, the foreign scholar--Erasmus of Rotterdam--arrived at Oxford, brought over to England by Lord Mountjoy from Paris.[181] Erasmus was an entire st...

Colet’s labours in connection with his school did not interfere with his ordinary duties. He was still, Sunday after Sunday, preaching those courses of sermons on ‘the Gospels,...

[425] The date of the death of More’s first wife it is not easy exactly to fix. Cresacre More says, ‘His wife Jane, as long as she lived, which was but some six years, brought u...

An early copy had doubtless been sent to him, and with the volume itself, it would seem, came a letter from Erasmus, probably from Antwerp, by the hand of Peter Meghen--‘Unoculu...

It was on a July morning in the year 1514 that Erasmus again crossed the Channel. The wind was fair, the sea calm, the sky bright and sunny; but during the easy passage Erasmus...

Towards the close of 1505, Erasmus arrived in England, to renew his intimacy with his English friends.[310] He had not this time to visit Oxford in order to meet them. Colet, Gr...

It was probably in Michaelmas Term of 1496[6] that the announcement was made to doctors and students of the University of Oxford that John Colet, a late student, recently return...

But though he had escaped the robbers, and survived the toils of the journey, he reached Basle in a state of health so susceptible of infection, that, in the course of a day or...

If Colet returned to his pulpit after a narrow escape of being burned for heresy, it was to continue to do his duty, and not to preach in future only such sermons as might escap...

During the autumn of 1513 Erasmus made up his mind to leave Cambridge. He had come to England on the accession of Henry VIII. with full purpose to make it his permanent home.[45...

The New Testament of Erasmus ought not to be regarded by any means as a mere reproduction of the Greek text, or criticised even _chiefly_ as such. The labour which falls to the...

Fully as Colet joined his friends in rejoicing at the accession to the throne of a king known to be favourable to himself and his party, he had drunk by far too deeply of the sp...

While Erasmus in 1517 was hard at work at the revision of his New Testament, publishing the first instalment of his Paraphrases,[652] recommending the ‘Utopia’ and the ‘Christia...

that it might be more clearly known that they were healed.... And for all the benefits he rendered, he never once took any reward, nor glory, nor money, nor pleasure, nor rule,...