Books by Desiderius Erasmus

Volume 18 in the Collected Works of Erasmus series covers the period from 1 April 1531 to 30 March 1532. The most persistent theme in the letters is the fear, to which Erasmus had long been prey, that the religious strife in Germany and Switzerland would eventually lead to armed conflict.

The essay that begins this introductory volume to the Adages explores the development of the Collectanea and its transformation into the Adagiorum chiliades.

Many of the letters in this volume, which covers the period August 1530 to March 1531, reflect Erasmus' anxieties over events at the Diet of Augsburg (June-November 1530).

Paraphrase on Luke 1-10 contains the first half of Erasmus's Paraphrase on Luke the second half of which appeared in this series in 2003 - and completes the set of translations of the Paraphrasesinto English.

In the months following, covered in this volume of the CWE, from August 1516 to June 1517, the active exchange of letters that began with volume 3 continued, giving a vivid impression of the impact of Erasmus' great achievement upon his contemporaries.

This new volume in the Collected Works of Erasmus series contains the first-ever English translations of the Apology and the Responses. These two pieces display Erasmus the humanist in the thick of academic turmoil, deploying all the rhetorical weapons at his command.

An old-spelling critical edition of William Roye's 1529 English translations of works by Erasmus and Martin Luther. Parker's thorough volume includes an introduction that situates the text and explains its importance for the English reform movement.

A special feature of this volume is the first fully annotated translation of Erasmus' Catalogues Iucubrationum (Ep 1341 A), an extremely important document for the study of Erasmus' life and works and of the controversies they aroused.

Consisting of Erasmus' commentary on psalms 38, 83, and 14, this is the third and final volume of the Expositions of the Psalms in the Collected Works of Erasmus.

Spanning the period of 1523 to 1534, the compositions in Volume 78 of the Collected Works of Erasmus detail Erasmus' theological disagreements with the Swiss and Upper German 'evangelicals' and the German Lutherans, including Luther himself.

These Paraphrases address the modern reader with the relevance of the moral issues they define and the perennial importance of the theological questions they raise.

In addition to a new translation of Praise of Folly, this volume also includes other works by Erasmus: Pope Julius Barred from Heaven, Epigram against Pope Julius II and a selection of his Adages. Together with the extensive annotation of the texts, these help to set Erasmus's masterpiece.

The volume features several memorable letters by Thomas More that testify to his integrity and clear-sightedness, his capacity for sober self-assessment and restraint combined with charity. It also contains one of Erasmus' most famous letters, Ep 999, which paints a subtle and sparkling pen portrait of More, the man and the Christian.

Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466-1536) is one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance humanist movement, which abandoned medieval pieties in favour of a rich new vision of the individual's potential. Praise of Folly, written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, is Erasmus's best-known work. Its dazzling mixture of fantasy and satire is narrated by a personification of Folly, dressed as a jester, who celebrates youth, pleasure, drunkenness and sexual desire, and goes on to lambast human pretensions, foibles and frailties, to mock theologians and monks and to praise the 'folly' of simple Christian piety. Erasmus's wit, wordplay and wisdom made the book an instant success, but it also attracted what may have been sales-boosting criticism. The Letter to Maarten van Dorp, which is a defence of his ideas and methods, is also included.