Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”

Mark 6:4 (New Revised Standard Version)

Although not strictly applicable to Erasmus of Rotterdam—for starters, he was Dutch rather than English—Jesus’ words have long sounded a note of truth when applied to the study of Erasmus reception in early modern Britain. There have been two significant waves of academic interest in the topic. The first began more than fifty years ago; it yielded such classic works as James McConica’s English Humanists and Reformation Politics: Under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1968) and E.J. Devereux’s Renaissance English Translations of Erasmus (1983), each of which remains crucially important in the field. The second wave is ongoing. It includes John Craig’s two studies of English parish ownership of Erasmus’ Paraphrases, Gregory Dodds’ Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (2009), and the ongoing series Erasmus in English, 1523–1584, the first two volumes of which are reviewed in this issue. Although no single development can be taken as a monocausal explanation for the recent crop of interest in English-speaking Erasmus reception, it would be remiss to ignore the import of the University of Toronto Series Collected Works of Erasmus. Begun in 1974 and intended for 89 volumes, nothing has done more to keep Erasmus before English-speaking audiences.

But upon perusing the essays gathered here, a question will likely remain: why, given Erasmus’ evident import, is study of his influence such a recent development? It is genuinely surprising that there aren’t more studies of Erasmus reception in Britain, and that some topics—the reign of Edward VI, or Erasmus’ influence in Scotland or Ireland—remain terra incognita. At least one answer is rooted in the nineteenth-century transformation of sixteenth-century religious history. The Victorian era saw two vitally influential, multi-volume works published on Anglican religious history: those of the Parker Society, which focused on the English Reformation (read in strictly Protestant terms), and the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, which stressed continuity between medieval Catholic and later Anglican traditions. Each series was, in various ways, groundbreaking; many of its volumes remain not just standard references still today, but the best we have ever had—and perhaps ever will. And yet, neither gave any place to Erasmus. The Parker Society volumes became central to how Low Church Anglicans imagined the past; the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology became equally important to High Church Anglican assumptions; and still today, very few have any idea that, as Tudor-era religious change took shape(s), Erasmus’ New Testament Paraphrases was just as important as better known works like the Book of Common Prayer and the English Bibles. It is therefore unsurprising that when Joshua Bennett discusses Erasmus in his recent study God and Progress: Religion and History in British Intellectual Culture, 1845–1914,¹ the great Dutch humanist is never mentioned in tandem with either “high” or “low” Anglican subcultures. Lori Anne Ferrell rightly notes that “from a quick examination of the origins and histories of our own historical documents, many of which we still consult in Victorian-era volumes, contemporary polemics—even those presented ‘without alteration, abridgment, or omission’—especially those presented ‘without alteration, abridgment, or omission’—can have a powerful way of standing between revisionist historians and their impeccable archival research.”² Scholarship guides; if we’re honest, it sometimes also misleads.

The essays that follow trace Erasmus into, through, and even against any number of inherited set of respectable academic juxtapositions: Renaissance and Reformation, Protestant and Catholic, radical and reactionary. Kristen Walton offers what is likely the first ever study of Erasmus’ influence on sixteenth-century Scotland. Maria Fallica freshly analyzes the interaction between John Colet and Erasmus surrounding marriage, a surprisingly contentious sacrament. Benjamin Guyer traces Erasmus’ marked influence on Eucharistic debate during the reign of Edward VI, when Protestant influence was supposedly at its height. Gregory Dodds brings matters into the late seventeenth century by analyzing Erasmus’ impact on debates over toleration during the short but tumultuous reign of James II. As will be seen, the problem is less Erasmus, who sometimes frustrated contemporaries with his unyielding resistance to partisan labels and hardline positions; the problem is more those who demarcate the past, often in partisan ways that past historical actors would neither have recognized nor accepted. Historical study is a slow burn. But sometimes its study yields light.