Erasmus: Seven Things You Should Know

Erasmus of Rotterdam may have been the first person in modern history to make his living entirely by writing - or so the historian Thomas Cahill claims. Whether or not that's strictly true, Erasmus was undeniably one of the most consequential and contradictory figures of his age: a priest who mocked the Church he never left, a scholar who rewrote a thousand years of biblical assumption using nothing but Greek manuscripts and stubbornness, and a reluctant participant in the religious rupture that split Europe in two.

In this volume of the I'm No Expert, But series, I went looking for what was most surprising about Erasmus and came back with seven things worth knowing: how he turned the new business of print into a career, how his Greek New Testament upended twelve centuries of certainty, how an illegitimate, orphaned boy talked his way out of a monastery, how he built a personal network that spanned the continent, how a joke written for a friend became one of the era's most successful books, how his break with Martin Luther cost him allies on both sides, and how the church he never abandoned spent decades afterward trying to ban his books.

A bonus chapter - the strange case of one Bible verse Erasmus left out, then quietly put back in - rounds out the volume.

Short, accurate, and genuinely curious, this book is for readers who know Erasmus's name and want to know the man.