Martin LutherErasmus

Following up on assignment #7's focus on the ideas of an individual and their meaning, here's another - this time asking you to have a look at the ideas of two very famous men to see if (at all) they might have any relationship to each other. These are Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther. The first was probably the most famous of all the "northern humanists" produced by the Renaissance, and the other (of course) was the first of those who came to be called Protestants. Both (like almost all western Europeans) were at first Roman Catholics who felt strongly that their Church had become corrupt and required change. But Erasmus was born and died as a Catholic. Luther, on the other hand, left the Church (in which he had been a priest). There was a very famous sixteenth century epigram about the two of them, which said that ". . .where Erasmus laid the eggs, Luther hatched the chicks." What might this mean? Do you think it might be valid? How?

For this essay effort, you would be well-advised (as always) to read very carefully your textbook's account of their lives and careers, and then to read what they had to say for themselves in the excerpts produced in your "Roots" sourcebook, in particular Erasmus's anonymous and very popular satire which imagines what reception Pope Julius II might expect when meeting St. Peter at the "pearly gates" of heaven. He wrote and published it in 1517, the very year Martin Luther tacked his own 95 theses about the Church on the door of his home parish church in Wittenberg on Halloween.

So what you need to do is to discover 1) what their complaints might have been, and 2) to determine whether they had any validity, and (finally) 3) whether they might have had any sort of cause and effect relationship as asserted in the already mentioned epigram about eggs and chicks.

To understand Erasmus and his times, you would also do well to read the account of his little book on manners, as recounted in the essay called "The Development of the Concept of Civilite" by Norbert Elias, distributed in class. There you will learn (among other things) why belching at the dinner table - not to mention the other two of the proverbial "three winds" - constitutes bad manners.

Post responses by 20 November 1997.