In 1998, Wilhelm Ribhegge, in an article (‘Erasmus und Europa: Studien zur Korrespondenz des Erasmus von Rotterdam’) published in the Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, maintained that the correspondence of Erasmus of Rotterdam established a humanist republic of letters that transcended national boundaries. His correspondence made him a European. In the same article, Ribhegge attributed the scant attention that German historians paid to French and English translations of Erasmus’ correspondence to what he called ‘the Sonderweg of German intellectual history’ (p. 550). Presumably German historians, in Ribhegge’s opinion, tended to neglect scholarship in other modern European languages. Twelve years later, in 2010, Ribhegge published Erasmus von Rotterdam with the Primus Verlag, an imprint of the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG). Erasmus’ correspondence naturally served as a prominent source for this biography. Ribhegge’s newest biography of Erasmus, reviewed here, appears in the series Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung (KLK) published by Aschendorff. The purpose of this instalment in the series is ‘to introduce the twenty-one volumes’ (p. 9) of the humanist’s correspondence in English translation published by the University of Toronto Press in its impressive Collected Works of Erasmus (CWE). Correcting the supposed provincial Sonderweg of German intellectual history does not surface as Ribhegge’s express purpose. Ribhegge does not justify presenting the complete English translation of Erasmus’ correspondence for a German audience.
The KLK series serves as an unlikely venue for the biography. Ribhegge does not endow Erasmus with conspicuously Catholic credentials. His ‘dissociation from the Reformation’ (p. 185), and thus alienation from Protestantism, did not reflect a concomitant inclination towards a Catholic tradition of devotion and theology or a gesture towards a nascent Catholic confessionalism. In Ribhegge’s biography, an analysis of Erasmus’ political and pedagogical publications figures more prominently than a recognition of the humanist’s works to promote piety and church ministry. Ribhegge’s Erasmus is not a proponent of church reform. Erasmus’ Europe is not a Catholic Christendom, but a republic of letters menaced by the rising tide of conflicting nationalisms.
The CWE correspondence volumes enable ‘a novel access to Erasmus’ (p. 223). Ribhegge draws this conclusion from their positive scholarly reception, which highlights the expertise of the editorial commentary and the facility of translation for readers unfamiliar with Latin. Their chief value is to provide a chronological structure for his biography that punctuates a survey of seven chapters spanning Erasmus’ youth in the Low Countries and Paris and his final years in Basel in 1535 and 1536. The punctuation is uneven. The divisions of CWE x (April 1523–December 1524) and CWE xiv and xv combined (January 1528–August 1529) merit about four pages each, while the analysis of CWE xvii (August 1530–March 1531) takes up eleven pages.
A comparison between Ribhegge’s two biographies tarnishes the claim for novelty of access to Erasmus that he bestows on the CWE volumes. The structure that these volumes lend to the second biography fund an opportunity to repeat a great deal of the material from the first biography, in which Ribhegge relied predominantly on P. S. Allen’s edition of Erasmus’ correspondence in the original Latin. While in the postface Ribhegge expresses gratitude for the inclusion of Das Leben des Erasmus in the KLK series, nowhere does the book indicate a recognition of the Primus Verlag or the WBG for the extensive borrowing from Erasmus von Rotterdam. A published statement, presumably, was not necessary for copyright purposes. In a few instances, Ribhegge cited prefaces and introductions to CWE volumes and introductions to translated letters. In 2010, he pointed out that Erasmus published in Leuven with Dirk Martens a corrected version of his Colloquies in 1519 (Erasmus von Rotterdam, 125). In 2024, he documented the same sentence with a reference to the preface to ep. 909 in CWE vi (Das Leben des Erasmus, 111 n. 607).
Where Ribhegge quoted in German translation from Allen’s edition in Erasmus von Rotterdam, he maintains his translations in Das Leben des Erasmus, transferring references to Allen to page and line numbers in CWE. Two examples suffice. The second biography (pp. 67–172) reproduces with only minor changes Ribhegge’s discussion in the first biography (pp. 169–73) of the letters that Erasmus received from and sent to Augsburg at the time in 1530 of the imperial diet in that city. Both biographies end with an identical analysis of letters (Erasmus von Rotterdam, 207–9; Das Leben des Erasmus, 216–18) written in 1535 (epp. 3049, 3066) between Erasmus and Bishop Piotr Tomicki of Kraków.
Erasmus’ publications receive due recognition from Ribhegge. His treatment in the second biography (pp. 57–60) of the monumental accomplishments of 1516, the Novum instrumentum and the edition of Jerome, replicates the treatment of these works in the first biography (pp. 81–4). His summaries of the Institutio principis christiani, Querela pacis and Colloquies in Das Leben des Erasmus (pp. 60–3, 75–7, 111–14) repeat with some abbreviation his original summaries in Erasmus von Rotterdam (pp. 84–6, 91–5, 125–9). By contrast, Ribhegge embellishes his presentation of the Ciceronianus in the second biography by adding a paragraph on ‘the language of Cicero’ (p. 182), while cutting short Erasmus’ comparison of citizenship of Rome and of Basel. Otherwise, the two expositions of Erasmus’ dialogue on Renaissance Latin are interchangeable. Ribhegge reiterates the significance of Erasmus’ achievement in the Ciceronianus: ‘He develops a new awareness of history’ (Erasmus von Rotterdam, 182; Das Leben des Erasmus, 179).
Duplication pervades Ribhegge’s second biography. Textual reformulations, deletions and insertions as well as the repositioning of material prevent the second biography from being an exact replica of the first. Yet the two books have too much in common to warrant the biographical repackaging of Das Leben des Erasmus. Although unique to the second biography, the brief, superficial review of scholarship on Erasmus in the introduction (pp. 9–12) and conclusion (pp. 219–23) is tangential to the promotion of the CWE correspondence volumes. Erasmus’ correspondence remains, of course, an indispensable source of insight into his thought, self-fashioning and reception.
