84 Ch. 3 • The Two Reformations
In England at the end of the sixteenth century, Latin remained the lan
guage of high culture. There Machiavelli’s The Prince was widely read and
debated in Latin. When continental scholars traveled to England, they could
discuss common texts with their English counterparts. Sir Thomas More
(1478-1535), English lawyer and statesman, reflected the influence of Re
naissance humanism, writing poetry in Latin. In his Utopia (1516), a satire
of contemporary political and social life, More asked readers to consider
their own values in the context of their expanding knowledge of other soci
eties, including those of the New World.
The spread of the cultural values of Renaissance humanism across the
Alps into the German states and northern Europe helped prepare the way
for the Reformation. Like the Renaissance, the Reformation was in some
ways the work of humanists moving beyond what they considered to be the
constraints of Church theology. Humanists, who had always been concerned
with ethics, attacked not only the failings of some clerics but also some of
the Church’s teachings, especially its claim to be immune to criticism. They
also condemned superstition in the guise of religiosity. Northern Renais
sance humanists w'ere the sworn enemies of scholasticism, the medieval sys
tem of ecclesiastical inquiry in which Church scholars used reason to prove
the tenets of Christian doctrine within the context of assumed theological
truths. By suggesting that individuals who were not priests could interpret
the Bible for themselves, they threatened the monopoly of Church theolo
gians over biblical interpretation.
Erasmus's Humanistic Critique of the ChurchAn energetic Dutch cleric contributed more than any other person to the
growth of Renaissance humanism in northern Europe. Bom to unmarried
parents and orphaned in Rotterdam, Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469—1536)
spent seven years in a monastery. Ordained a priest in 1492, he taught at
the universities of Cambridge and Louvain, and then worked as a tutor in
Paris and in Italy. As a young man, Erasmus may have suffered some sort of
trauma—perhaps a romantic attachment that was either unreciprocated or
inopportunely discovered. Thereafter compulsively obsessed with cleanli
ness, he was determined to infuse the Church with a new moral purity
influenced by the Renaissance.
The patronage of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and several other
statesmen permitted Erasmus to apply the scholarly techniques of humanism
to biblical study. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1509) was a satirical survey of
the world as he saw it but also a clear call for a pure Christian morality shorn
of the corruption he beheld in the monastic system. Thus, he wrote that
priests claimed “that they’ve properly performed their duty if they reel off per
functorily their feeble prayers which I’d be greatly surprised if any god could
hear or understand.” He believed that the scholastics of the Middle Ages had,
like the barbarians, overwhelmed the Church with empty, lifeless theology.