Works of Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus was the most popular, most printed and arguably most influential author of the early Sixteenth Century, read in all nations in the West and frequently translated. By the 1530s, the writings of Erasmus accounted for 10 to 20 percent of all book sales in Europe.^[1] "Undoubtedly he was the most read author of his age."^[2]: 608

His vast number of Latin and Greek publications included translations, paraphrases, letters, textbooks, plays for schoolboys, commentary, poems, liturgies, satires, sermons, and prayers. He is noted for his extensive scholarly editions of the New Testament and the complete works of numerous Church Fathers. A large number of his later works were defences of his earlier work from attacks by Catholic and Protestant theological and literary opponents.

His work was at the forefront of the contemporary Catholic Reformation and advocated a spiritual reform program he called the "philosophia Christi" and a theological reform agenda he called the Method of True Theology. It provided much of the material that spurred the Protestant Reformation, the Anglican Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; the influence of his ideas continues to the present.^[3]

Following the Council of Trent, which endorsed many of his themes, such as his theology on Free Will, many of his works were at times banned or required to be expurgated under various Catholic regional Indexes of prohibited books, and issued anonymously or bastardized with sectarian changes in Protestant countries. Many of his pioneering scholarly editions were superseded by newer revisions or re-brandings, and the popularity of his writings waned as pan-European Latin-using scholarship gave way to vernacular scholarship and readership.