Recensie: Erasmus, Man of Letters

Een van de Princeton-actietitels (20% kassakorting, actie uit 2016) is Erasmus, Man of Letters van de in 2015 overleden eminente historica Lisa Jardine. Wij brengen een fragment. 

The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning could command public admiration without the need for authorial self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself — the historical as opposed to the figural individual — was a brilliant, maverick innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating study of Erasmus but also a bold account of a key moment in Western history, a time when it first became possible to believe in the existence of something that could be designated "European thought."

Lisa Jardine is professor of Renaissance studies at University College London, where she is also director of the UCL Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.

Introduction

Self-Portrait in Pen and Ink

What cannot Durer express in monochromes, that is, by black lines only (even though other techniques of his deserve admiration also)?
-Erasmus, De pronuntiatione

In the Shadow of Erasmus

For anyone whose education has included the cultural history of the sixteenth century, the name of Desiderius Erasmus is virtually synonymous with that of the European intellectual Renaissance. For many people, indeed, whether scholars or amateurs, Erasmus's name conjures up a whole lost world of learning, belief, and, above all, integrity. His were the golden days, when men thirsted for knowledge, pursued it disinterestedly and without regard for financial reward, when individual achievement was first recognised, and when the humanely learned individual was vir bonus-a good man.
Like so many others, I have pursued my scholarly Renaissance studies in the shadow of Erasmus's reputation. At one of my earliest meetings with my doctoral advisor, the late Professor Robert Bolgar, he pulled down a volume of Erasmus's letters from his library shelf, and asked me to translate a passage. In so doing, he was, I now understand, simply continuing a tradition in the pedagogic use of Erasmus epistolae-exemplary pieces of writing, dense with difficult Latin syntax and rarely encountered eloquence, exercises in retrieving the moral sentiments and felicitous expression of an antique past. Even then, I knew this was a test any aspiring scholar of Renaissance thought had to pass-an initiation test, a rite of passage. And like so many other graduate students in Renaissance studies, I made a mental note not to stumble too closely on Erasmus territory in my own research undertakings in the period-to leave the study of Erasmus himself to scholars of lofty eminence (and advanced years).
As a project, therefore, the present book has proved an unexpected one, both in its conception and in the direction of its development. I never intended to work on Erasmus. I certainly never expected that researches which began as a kind of quest for the intellectual driving force behind what I had identified as a key development in Renaissance thought- humanist dialectic as the core of the arts educational curriculum-would lead me to Erasmus. And finally, when I uncovt;red a story of extraordinarily complex and sophisticated manipulations of writing and printing, designed to construct a worldwide reputation both for a movement (Low Countries humanism) and an individual, I was nonplussed that that individual should be that much-idealised figure, Erasmus.
For the trail I followed showed that establishing the stature of the man and making his reputation were an integral part of the strategy that Erasmus and those around him were developing, in the early decades of the sixteenth century. However 'great' the man was in reality, however awesome his talents and his achievements, it came as a shock to watch him, through the pages of his own and others' works, fashioning that greatness himself.
At the same time, there was something historically intriguing about this encounter. Here was a figure generally held up to us as without blemish of worldliness, and as intellectually eminent by virtue of his intrinsic gifts, his relentless dedication to study, his unswerving commitment to truth, and his eschewing of all worldly distractions and (most) rewards. And yet, here I uncovered him shaping his own persisting trace in intellectual history, adjusting his public image, editing the evidence to be left for his biographers, managing the production of 'influences' and contemporary movements to enhance his own posthumous renown. All this with a clear and steady confidence that the importance of the project on which he was embarked justified such activities, that the advancement of learning was so urgent and important a task that it entitled the practitioner to use every ingenious method at his disposal to ensure that the cause prospered.
This last point, I think, needs stressing, to avoid misunderstanding. When, in graphic and textual representations of himself, Erasmus chose to inhabit the familiar figure of Saint Jerome, with all the grandeur and intellectual gravitas that might thereby accrue to him, he claimed a role in the secular sphere equivalent to Jerome's in the spiritual. His figural presence was designed to give prominence to the northern humanist movement, to enable it to achieve international prestige and prominence; personal fame was merely a by-product. Jerome stood for the dissemination of true scripture throughout the Western world; Erasmus would stand for the dissemination of humane learning across Europe.
We twentieth-century advancers of learning have altogether lost any such confidence in grand designs. We are painfully aware of an apparently flagging eminence, a diminished stature, a waning of a world in which men of letters made the agenda, and worldly men then strove to pursue it. We have ceased, I suggest, to promote learning as such, because we have lost Erasmus's conviction that true learning is the originator of all good and virtuous action-that right thought produces right government. In fact, of course, we try not to use words like true, good, virtuous, and right at all, if we can help it. They embarrass us. We are too deeply mired in the relativity of all things to risk truth claims. And on the whole we believe that in all of this, our age is one of loss-that we have lost something which the age of Erasmus possessed.
And yet, apparently, there never was a golden age, when learning selfevidently commanded the attention and admiration of the secular world, or, if there was, it was lost by the time of Erasmus. I argue here that Erasmus's European prominence was something in which Erasmus himself made a considerable investment, in terms of effort and imagination. I shall show how masterfully he manipulated the new contemporary media-the supremely illusionistic painting and the printed book (in particular, the volume of published 'familiar letters')-exploiting their sophisticated use for communication in a thoroughly innovative way. In an age for which the idea of an intellectual reputation at a distance was a strange one, or at least one associated almost exclusively with ancient writers and their texts, his command of publishing and printing in particular worked to produce him compellingly outside his own Low Countries milieu. He invented the charisma of the absent professor-the figure who creates awe by his name on the title page, not by his presence in the classroom. The teacher, indeed, who was never present (after his earliest, impoverished years, Erasmus never actually taught), but whose presence was evoked in portrait, woodcut, or published collection of personal letters, set alongside the wildly successful, constantly reissued, revised, and re-edited textbooks, translations, and editions.
What made Erasmus's textual self-presentation so enduringly convincing was the virtuoso use he made of richly signifying, reassuringly current, readily available models. Around the figure of Saint Jerome in his study, I shall show, Erasmus built a multidimensional cultural persona, resonating with verbal echoes and visual allusions, a persona wholly compatible with that of the auctor on the model of the Church Father or the civic hero of Greece or Rome. This manufactured 'master' presides magisterially over the text, successfully transmitting its message with an illusion of immediacy which belies the fact that the printed book is in every sense a 'copy', not an 'original'. 'Original', indeed, is thereby made to mean 'infused with a transferrable aura of authority, transmitted from worthy model to worthy emulator'-Erasmus in Jerome's study inspires the reader's confidence. The merging of Erasmus with Jerome is achieved so brilliantly, with such consummate cultural skill, that it is little wonder that that image has endured so convincingly down to the present day.
The extraordinary and apparently commanding stature of Erasmus, captured aptly and permanently in the surviving portraits by Metsys and Holbein with which we are still today so familiar, was then, just as it is now, an illusion. Erasmus himself - the historical, as opposed to the figural Erasmus - was a maverick innovator who in his lifetime achieved limited academic recognition and no significant clerical preferment. He was an itinerant producer of textbooks and translations in multiple copies; he rarely kept a home of his own but lived in the houses of printers, and ran a bustling publishing 'workshop' (officina). His works were attacked as unorthodox, denigrated as nonaligned, and banned as politically and doctrinally subversive. The enduring image of Erasmus which seems to stand as some kind of reproach to our own contemporary, fragmented intellectual efforts is Erasmus's own evaluation of his achievement, his own statement of the importance and potential reach and influence of his learning. It is not, and was not, the evaluation of the Europe he inhabited.

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