WHO NEEDS GREEK?

Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism

SIMON GOLDHILL
Reader in Greek Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge and Fellow of King’s College
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Goldhill, Simon.
Who needs Greek? Contests in the cultural history of Hellenism / Simon Goldhill.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN     (hardback) – ISBN     (paperback)

. Greek language – Study and teaching – History. . Civilization, Modern – Greek

influences. . Greece – Civilization. . Hellenism. I. Title.
PA .G 

.  – dc



ISBN     hardback

ISBN     paperback
 Contents

List of illustrations page vi

List of abbreviations viii

Introduction: shaking the foundations 

 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
 Becoming Greek, with Lucian 
 Blood from the shadows: Strauss’ disgusting,
degenerate Elektra 
 Who knows Greek? 
 The value of Greek. Why save Plutarch? 
Conclusion: rainbow bridges 

Works cited 

Index 

v
 Illustrations

 Portrait of Erasmus, by Quentin Metsys. The Royal Collection

C , Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II page 
 Portrait of Peter Gilles, by Quentin Metsys. Private collection.
Photograph: Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art 
 Viola Tree, from The Tatler, . By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Christian Herter, from The Tatler, . By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Raymond Duncan, from The Sketch, . By permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson, from The Tatler, .
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson, from The Tatler, .
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson, from The Tatler, .
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Maude Odell, from The Tatler, . By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Princess Mahara, from The Tatler, . By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Viola Tree, from The Illustrated London News, . By permission
of the British Library 
 ‘Elektra’ [Edyth Walker], from The Illustrated London News,
. By permission of the British Library 
 Edyth Walker in the role of Elektra, from The Sketch, .
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 The cast of Elektra, from The Daily Telegraph, .
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 The costumes for Elektra, from The Daily Express, .
The Royal Opera House Archives 
vi
 List of illustrations vii
 Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, the entrance of Clytemnestra.
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Gertrude Eysoldt in the role of Elektra. By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Gertrude Eysoldt in the role of Elektra. By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Gertrude Eysoldt in the role of Elektra. By permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Robert Lowe, (), and Lord Sherbrooke [Robert Lowe],
(), from Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Robert Lowe,
Viscount Sherbrooke, G.C.B., D.C.L., by A. Patchett Martin ().
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library 
 Abbreviations

CPW Matthew Arnold. Collected Prose Works, ed. R. Super,  vols.,

Ann Arbor
CWW Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. W. Ellis,  vols.,
London (–)
CWE Collected Works of Erasmus, Toronto (– )
CWM Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More,
New Haven (– )
EE Erasmi Epistolae, ed. P. S. Allen,  vols., Oxford (–)
OL Orbis Litterarum
GQ German Quarterly
MLR Modern Language Review
DVLG Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift f ür Literaturwissenschaft
und Geistesgeschichte

All other abbreviations as in L’Année philologique

viii
 CHAPTER ONE

Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus

Why should you care about Erasmus?

Let me make a case, as best I can. First of all – and this is not a joking
matter – he invented the academic, at least for the modern West. I don’t
mean the scholarly bore, the trivial questioner, the man – yes, this one usu-
ally is a man – who has no connection with the Real World of power and
politics. And I am certainly not talking about the job of university lecturer.
No, I mean your fantasy of what you might be doing by reading and writing
or teaching. The intellectual whose pursuit of truth changes the way that
the world is perceived. The writer whose contribution does not merely
mark a massive shift in the cultural and intellectual world but creates it.
The teacher whose teaching dominates a culture and whose values are
passed across the generations. The very grandest fantasy one could share.
Erasmus was the first and greatest international intellectual super-
star of the modern West. During the violent invention of Protestantism,
Erasmus was accused of being a founding father of that passionate
revolution and of rejecting its basic tenets – by different sides in
the Reformation. He was instrumental in the complete overhaul of the
education system, particularly in England, and his works still made up the
basic tools of the schoolroom centuries later. By law, his paraphrases of
the Gospels were placed in every parish church in the kingdom, ‘next to
the Bible’, and every cleric below the level of Doctor of Divinity was
required to own his own copy of that work. His words were placed in
all those mouths and minds. The writer he translated first, however, and
always loved was put on the Index of banned books by the Catholic
Church and became a byword for cynical blasphemy. Yet he dedicated

The following footnotes contain mainly references for passages cited, major academic debts, and
some further reading on detailed points. They are the barest minimum, and need not be consulted
while reading the text.


 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
his most controversial religious volume – the first Greek edition of the
Gospels – to the Pope and received a letter of praise in reply. He wrote
letter after self-promoting letter, many hundreds of which were collected
and published in book form in his lifetime, constructing an image of an in-
ternational brotherhood of scholars so strongly that a scholar’s name and
standing could be denigrated simply by the rhetorical question, ‘Where
is his letter from Erasmus?’ By any conventional standard, Erasmus mat-
ters. If all the name Erasmus evokes is a vague image of a pious humanist,
that would be really missing the boat. He was an ambivalent, provoca-
tive, polemical figure who divided and dominated European intellectual
life. He was profoundly instrumental in the construction of conflicts still
being waged today. We are all his heirs.
But I have another concern, which some might think a touch
parochial. I care about Erasmus because he made learning Greek sexy.
That is, important, politically charged, socially relevant, and trendy. He
has become, I confess, a major figure in my fantasy.
Erasmus had a Mission with Greek. He wrote repeatedly about learn-
ing Greek and tirelessly performed his role of demanding, cajoling, teach-
ing, stimulating knowledge of Greek in cities across Europe, often in the
face not just of apathy but of organized and extended opposition. This
is a story with a Hero for a classicist like me. He made learning Greek a
myth of his own coming to be, and made it a requirement of those who
wanted to follow him into his version of an intellectual calling. ‘How is
your Greek progressing?’, he kept nagging bishops, theologians, politi-
cians, students. It is with missionary pride that he writes from from Calais
to Reuchlin, the distinguished German scholar of Hebrew in Stuttgart,
that Colet – the founder of St Paul’s School in London – ‘old man as he is,
is learning Greek’. And adds, ‘The Bishop of Rochester has made good
progress.’ And he encourages Reuchlin also to send a letter to Colet
to gee him up in the enterprise. The shared international enterprise.
There were many major issues which demanded Erasmus’ attention and
engagement, of course, but learning Greek was not just an adjunct to his
religion or his scholarly agenda, nor was it a byproduct of his university
training. Studying Greek was integral and essential to Erasmus’ sense of
self and to the project that was his life.
Now at some point every discussion of Erasmus has to rehearse that
(auto)biographical project. There are biographies aplenty, of course,

 EE : – [ep ],  August . For the state of Greek studies in England, see Tilley
().
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
many of which are fascinating historical documents in themselves.
(His illegitimate birth, his leaving his first monastery because the con-
versation was sterile, his choosing his own first name, I will leave to the
novel – though I admit that in view of the story of translation I am about
to tell, I do find it at very least intriguing that the name he chose for
himself, ‘Desiderius’, is – with self-conscious wit – the Latin translation
of what his name ‘Erasmus’ would mean in Greek, ‘desired’, ‘desirable’,
‘love(ly)’. This is also a story of desire, inevitably, and change. ‘Thou
art translated . . .’ How could a self-chosen name not be telling?) But it is
the Letters that make all the difference to what gets said about Erasmus.
Some of his letters are formal introductions to his books – dedicatory
epistles. Some are apologias – statements of defence – for his life and
work. There are numerous letters of recommendation, of encourage-
ment, of commentary on his work and relationships and the politics of
religious controversy. Every work of Erasmus is surrounded by the fila-
gree of self-representation, carefully preserved, circulated and edited by
generations of scholars, starting with Erasmus himself. Reading Erasmus
is continuously to watch him addressing ‘you . . .’, telling ‘you’ how to
read and live. The celebrated and remarkable twelve volume edition of
Erasmi Epistolae by P. S. Allen is crowding my desk as I write this, con-
stantly offering from its six thousand pages another gloss to any comment
on Erasmus’ work and biography. Erasmus’ life – as he and others re-tell
it – was important, politically charged, socially relevant, trendy: in part,
it is because learning Greek is such an important thread in Erasmus’
self-told life that it becomes such a hot topic.
But not only because of that. The excitement and passion of Erasmus’
discovery of Greek doesn’t lead simply to a desire to promote its pursuit
among his friends, as if Greek were a brilliant new game or technol-
ogy. Rather, knowledge of the Greek language provides a seminal link
between Erasmus’ scholarly activity and his hugely influential role in
the increasingly bitter and vitriolic politics of the Reformation. This is
a story where knowing how to translate Greek – or whether you should
translate Greek – becomes a life and death conflict about religious affil-
iation. It is the way in which studying Greek becomes intertwined with

 From Erasmus’ own Compendium Vitae () and Rhenanus () (both translated usefully in
Olin ed. ()) to Huizinga (), Bainton (), Tracy (), Halkin (); Tracy ().
 See Rhenanus (), [Olin ed. () ] for the self-recognition of the meaning of
‘Erasmus’/–raé sm[i]ov.
 For general intellectual background to Erasmian polemics, see Kristeller (); Nauert ();
Shuger (); Tracy (); Rummel () and Nelson (), each with further bibliographies.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
sixteenth-century politics, theology and cultural change that makes it
mean so much. A matter of your eternal soul. Thomas More (I can’t
avoid those conflicts even by not calling him either ‘Sir’ or ‘Saint’ . . . ),
Erasmus’ close friend, who translated the witty blasphemer Lucian along
with Erasmus, died on the scaffold with a calm witticism on his lips – and
it makes sense to see that life’s journey as a coherent intellectual narrative,
a consistent commitment to an ideal and a practice. The combination
of integrity and humour, commitment and wit, passion and learning,
mean that these friends have continued to be embraced as heroes of the
intellect. Our stars of the Renaissance. The study of Greek is integral to
this founding story of a new Europe, a new sense of the person.

II

I am going to begin my account of this engagment with Greek and with

religious and cultural politics through the study of Greek at the point
where Lisa Jardine begins her fine study of Erasmus’ self-construction
through his writing, namely, with a picture and a story. The picture is the
famous portrait of Erasmus painted by Quentin Metsys in  (the year
after Erasmus was writing to Reuchlin about Colet’s Greek studies) when
Erasmus was fifty-one. It is reproduced here as plate . It may be pretty
familiar, but that makes it hard to look (again) at its detail with enough
care. Its power – and polemics – will take some teasing out. The story
is the briefest of anecdotes about the painting from a letter to Thomas
More in the same year, which provides also a vivid vignette of why one
might not want to experience sixteenth-century medical practice. But
I think it is Erasmus’ wry self-recognition of his own Folly that has led
biographers to love to re-tell this story. And so will I.
Erasmus and his close friend, Peter Gilles, paid to have their portraits
painted in a diptych by Metsys to send as a present to their mutual
dear friend in London, Thomas More. Gilles fell rather seriously ill and
the project was delayed. Erasmus writes to More the following report:
‘I myself was in excellent health, but somehow the physician took it into
his head to tell me to take some pills to purge my bile, and the advice he
foolishly gave me I even more foolishly agreed to take. My portrait had

 As does especially Fox (). See also Duncan () –, and the extensive biographical
tradition from William Roper () and Harpsfield () to Chambers (), Reynolds ()
Marius () and Ackroyd (). Monti () rehearses the hagiographic tradition more
obviously than most.
 Jardine ().
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus

. Portrait of Erasmus, by Quentin Metsys

already begun, but after taking the medicine, when I went back to the
painter, he said it was not the same face; and so the painting has been
put off several days until I become somewhat more cheerful [alacrior].’
You can see how seductive Erasmus’ self-portrait can be. Wise after
the event, writing to his intimate friend and partner in irony, the great
scholar lets us see himself, apparently unbuttoned, foolishly following
foolish advice. The foibles of the patient’s dealings with his doctor are
sharply etched because we – Thomas More and you and I – know that
 EE :  [ep ],  May .
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
the man who stupidly swallows the bile-reduction pills is the celebrated
arbiter of biblical authorities, the counsellor to Christian princes – and
the author of the scandalous book, The Praise of – precisely – Folly. His
face – though not, finally, his portrait – reveals his discomfiture. This self-
deprecating anecdote was published a bare two years after the painting
was finished in one of the many collections of Erasmus’ letters published
in his lifetime, and it was widely circulated. We readers are being invited
to overhear the engaging private exchange of these famous friends. From
the beginning, then, the portrait of Erasmus which Metsys painted is
surrounded – framed – by Erasmus’ self-portrait in words. So, it should
be appreciated that the little story also lets us glimpse the collusion of
painter and sitter. Erasmus must present the right face to his friends and
to the public, and the painter directs him towards a somewhat more
cheerful, less bilious expression. His best side. As ever with realism, the
construction of image is all.
The Metsys portrait has indeed become an icon of the sixteenth
century. It would be hard for us now to picture Erasmus without it, so
many times has it been reproduced. (Like the later Holbein and Dürer
portraits, which Metsys already has influenced.) Concentrated, austere,
taut-faced, with a faint smile (‘somewhat more cheerful’), the dark scholar
writes intently in his study, surrounded by his books and the candlewick
trimmer (or scissors) hanging from the shelf. Four of the books are in-
scribed with titles, and each is a volume written by Erasmus – defining
the scholar in and by his works. Even the candlewick trimmers may have
a symbolic significance, representing the editorial projects of Erasmus,
‘trimming the wick of scriptures so that their light shines out strongly and
brightly’. It is a picture designed to project a very particular image of
Erasmus. Thomas More is its recipient, of course, and ideal viewer. But as
the published letters show, you and I, the wider public, are never far away.
It is so well known and so authoritative an image by now that it is hard to
imagine its power to shock or outrage. But even as a private gift, a gesture
of complicity shared between friends, this remains a provocative picture,
which takes a strikingly bold stance on the significance of Erasmus and
his works. This portrait is designed to be, as they say, in your face.
I want to try to explain how this picture of a scholar and his books
could be so charged. The portrait is modelled, as many scholars state,
on the contemporary iconography of St Jerome in his study. And the

 Hayum (); Gerlo ().  Jardine () .

 E.g. Jardine (); Gerlo (); Rice (), each with further bibliography.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
light source which illumines the face of Erasmus and the pages on which
he writes, also picks out a book on the shelf. You can read clearly on it
‘HIERONYMUS’, that is, JEROME. The iconography and the book are both
keys that open a route to the heart of Erasmus’ self-image. Lisa Jardine,
with particular flair, has explored the significance of this highlighted text
and Erasmus’ iconographic affiliation to the saint. It is a fascinating story
of intellectual formation.
Erasmus had published his edition of Jerome’s Letters in , with
a life of Jerome by way of introduction. It was a work he had been
planning for years, and he takes great pains to point out to you what
a massive task it has been to complete. ‘I had worked myself to death
that Jerome might live . . . it cost Jerome less to write his works than it
has cost me to restore and explain them.’ As early as , he wrote
to James Batt that he needed money desperately to buy the collected
works of Jerome (and some clothes and Greek books) in order to write a
commentary on the saint’s texts. He lectured on Jerome in Cambridge
during his formative stay there. Jerome is a constant reference point
for Erasmus over nearly forty years of study. He leads every list of heroes
of the Church for Erasmus, and is brought forward as an authority to
win argument after argument. He was the one figure writing in Latin
who could match or even better his beloved Greeks. As he wrote to Pope
Leo X, ‘I saw that St Jerome was so completely the first among Latin
theologians that we might call him the one person worthy of that name.
What a fund in him of Roman eloquence, what skill in languages, what a
knowledge of antiquity and of all history, what a retentive memory, what
a perfect familiarity with mystic literature, above all, what zeal, what a
wonderful inspiration of divine breath! He is the one person who at the
same time delights by his eloquence, teaches by his erudition, and ravishes
by his holiness.’ So how should a saint be praised to the Pope, these
days? The smelly, painful, lonely, sufferings of a Simon Stylites are far
from the linguistically gifted, scholarly theologian of Erasmus’ imagining.
(Is this the first time a saint has been lauded for his faculty of retentive
memory?) When Jerome goes to the desert, it was, as Erasmus tells it, to
‘re-read his entire library’ and systematically to collect references and

 EE :  [ep ],  May , to Pope Leo X; see also : ,  [ep ],  May , to
Domenico Grimani, for the same expressions.
 EE :  [ep ],  December , to James Batt.
 Thompson and Porter () – (with, in particular, EE :  [ep ],  July , to
Servatius Rogerius).
 EE :  [ep ],  May , to Pope Leo X.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
citations for later use. More sabbatical than mortification. It is Jerome’s
eloquence and erudition that lead even his ravishing holiness. He is a
good . . . historian. ‘Jerome is Erasmus’ hero and model’, as Olin puts it
succinctly, but ‘the portrait he has given us is that of the ideal Christian
humanist’.
The Church itself, when it declared Jerome one of the four Fathers
and Doctors of the Church back in , had glowingly declared that
‘their flowing discourse, fed by streams of heavenly grace, solves scrip-
tural problems, unties knots, explains obscurities, and resolves doubts’.
But the dominant strand of medieval representations had a suffering
penitent at its heart. Eugene Rice sums it up excellently: ‘so holy was
he that he remained a virgin until his death at ninety-six, traditional
exaggerations of both his age and his continence. He drank no wine and
ate no meat or fish. Indeed, he scarcely allowed even the words “meat”
and “fish” to pass his lips, but lived entirely on uncooked fruit, greens
and roots. He wore a hairshirt under rags, slept on the bare ground,
whipped himself three times a day until the blood flowed . . . and patiently
endured every imaginable abstinence, temptation and mortification.’
There were even groups of ascetic penitents, who particularly followed
that example of flagellation and fasting, called ‘Hieronymites’. It is
against this that Erasmus is writing his life of Jerome. Here’s how he puts
his portrait to the leading churchman Warham (who as Archbishop of
Canterbury led the Ashford inquisition in Kent which burnt five men at
the stake in   ):
Was there ever an individual expert in so many languages? Who ever achieved
such familiarity with history, geography, and antiquities? Who ever became so
equally and completely at home in all literature, both sacred and profane? If
you look to his memory, never was there an author, ancient or modern, who
was not at his immediate disposal.

Geography, history, languages and classical literature, coupled (again)

with a good memory, make Jerome a classy patron saint of academia

 See Rice () for balanced account of sources on Jerome in the desert.
 Olin () .
 Papal decree,  September , by Boniface VIII: Corpus Iuris Canonici Lib vi Decretalium,
III tit. xxii, cap. I: Eorum etiam foecunda facundia, coelestis irrigui gratia influente, scriptuarum aenigmata
reserat, solvit nodos, obscura dilucidat, dubiaque declarat.
 Rice () .
 Hughes () : forty-six arrested, forty-one recanted, five burnt at the stake.
 EE :  [ep ],  April , to William Warham: the whole letter, the dedication of the
volumes of Jerome, is an extended laudatio of the saint.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
(or perhaps the core curriculum). Indeed, not only does Erasmus find
an ideal Christian humanist in Jerome, but also, as he tells the story
of Jerome’s life, stripping away, as he claims, the fantastic tales of naive
hagiography, Erasmus himself becomes disconcertingly overlapped with
the figure he is describing. In a bizarre version of the ‘imitation of
saints’ recommended by Augustine and others, Erasmus’ scholarly strug-
gles are Jerome’s, Jerome’s lifework his. In Erasmus’ portrait, Jerome
and Erasmus look a lot alike. Metsys’ portrait of Erasmus, in depicting
Erasmus as Jerome, is following a fundamental strategy of Erasmus’ own
self-representation – or as Jardine would put it, his self-construction.
Erasmus’ identification with Jerome is not just because of the saint’s
academic powers. In a while, I will be discussing how vitriolically Erasmus
was attacked for his passion for secular studies, and in particular the study
of ancient Greece and Rome. The one story about St Jerome that ev-
eryone knew was the one about his dream. Jerome dreamt he appeared
before the tribunal of Heaven, where the grim figure of Christ the Judge
demanded he identify himself. ‘I am a Christian’, he declared. ‘You lie’,
retorted the Judge, ‘You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ And Jerome was flogged, and
‘tormented by the flame of conscience’, until he tearfully declared, ‘Lord,
if ever I again possess secular books or read them, I have denied you.’
Attempts to explain this dream as figurative, or to limit its purchase to
‘excessive study of Cicero’, or Cicero’s philosophical texts, foundered on
what Erasmus recognized as the story’s simple and annoyingly powerful
message. ‘This is the story which everyone remembers, even those who
have never read a word that Jerome has written. Jerome, they say, was
flogged because he read Cicero.’ In this way, Jerome himself could be
turned as an example against Erasmus and his mission. Although the
authority, sanctity and scholarship of Jerome were privileged appropri-
ations of Erasmus’ self-fashioning, there lurked in Jerome’s most famous
self-description a more threatening image. To study Jerome required a
knowledge of the classics, which Jerome himself seemed to ban. Jerome
may be ‘reborn in Erasmus’, but Erasmus could only try to explain
away Jerome’s famous tearful promise to give up the classics – or brazen
 Jerome Ep. . .
 Erasmus’ commentary on Jerome’s Ep. , in CWE . Jardine () – points out the
importance of Valla’s earlier celebration of Jerome in his defence of classical literature.
 A phrase taken from Jardine () . I have learnt a great deal from Jardine and Rice in
particular throughout this discussion of Jerome. The great Italian humanist, Lorenzo Valla,
is an important intermediary here also. Erasmus read Valla – who both praised Jerome and
wrote Annotationes to the New Testament.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
it out: ‘I would rather be whipped with Jerome than fêted in the company
of those who are so frightened by Jerome’s ideas that they scrupulously
avoid good literature.’ As Jardine puts it beautifully: ‘At the heart of
the Jerome edition – the opus Erasmus produced at the zenith of his
international career – and on the threshold of his self-formation as an
icon of scholar-piety – is the fusion or perhaps confusion of secular and
sacred attention.’
Erasmus had actually learnt Greek precisely in order to rescue his
hero and model: ‘I would rather be mad with Jerome than as wise as you
like with the crowd of modern theologians’, he writes in , ‘Moreover,
I am struggling with a laborious task which one might call the work of
Phaethon: to make it my role to restore the books of Jerome which in part
have been ruined by those half-educated fellows, and in part obscured
or mangled or mutilated or certainly falsified and full of monstrosities
because of ignorance of classical matters and of Greek literature . . . I see
that Greek must be my first priority of study. I have decided to learn
some months with a Greek teacher, a real Greek, or rather doubly Greek,
since he is always hungry and teaches for a large fee!’ The desire to
learn Greek (which doesn’t stop the standard Latin jokes about hungry
and money-grabbing Greeks) is in service of his aim of restoring Jerome
to the world as ‘prince of theologians’.
Knowledge of Greek, however, will turn out also to be the means
by which his own standing as theologian is achieved and contested –
primarily because of his edition of the Greek Bible. This celebrated and
scandalous edition – which I will come to very shortly – was inevitably
seen by many as an attack on Jerome, because he was traditionally
regarded as the author of the Vulgate, the standard Latin version of
the Bible, whose text Erasmus freely criticized and emended. Erasmus
denied that Jerome wrote the Vulgate (he was not the first to do so; and
it is clear that on any scholarly argument Jerome cannot be its author ;
but even the Council of Trent could not bring itself to make such a bold
declaration against tradition. ) Thus Erasmus found himself once again
going into battle both for himself and for his version of Jerome.
 Hieronymi Stridensis Vita [Ferguson ()] .  Jardine () .
 EE .  [ep ],  ? March , to Antony of Bergen; the whole letter extols Greek learning.
 Lefèvre d’Étaples and Paul of Middleburg had already denied Jerome was the translator.
See Rice () –; Schwartz () for a general background; Bentley () – for
Erasmus’ biblical philology. Particularly important for Erasmus was his (re)discovery of Valla’s
Adnotationes to the New Testament. See also the works cited below n. .
 Indeed it defended the Vulgate as authentic precisely because it was hallowed by the long
tradition of use in the Church. For everything you might want to know (and more) about the
Council of Trent, see Jedin (), especially, for our purposes here, vol. II, –.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
So learning Greek, studying Jerome, and becoming a polemical
theologian, fighting over Jerome, are interwoven ventures that stretch
throughout Erasmus’ life. When Metsys paints Erasmus in his study
in the iconographic pose of Jerome in his study, and highlights the text of
Jerome on which Erasmus had spent so many years’ effort, he is marking
out not merely a fundamental strand of Erasmus’ own self-fashioning,
but also the site on which Erasmus’ polemics have been waged. The
image of intently gazing sage with his book also signifies the intricate
and extended intellectual journey of the sitter and the strongly contested
struggles along the way.

III

The second most brightly lit book on the shelves of Metsys’ portrait,
shaded by an unnamed volume leaning over it, but with its title directly
facing the viewer, is marked ‘NOVUM TESTAMENT’, ‘The New Testament’,
truncated of its last syllable in Latin. Erasmus’ most celebrated con-
tribution to theological debate was his edition of the New Testament. The
outline of the story is simply told; the fallout complex and compelling.
Erasmus’ Greek studies led him back to the texts of the Gospels, writ-
ten originally in Greek, of course. They were, he recognized, in rather
poor Greek, especially when judged by the standard of the classical
masterpieces of Athens or by the assiduous imitators of those classical
masterpieces in the second century CE such as Lucian or Philostratus.
So, he set out to produce a critical edition of the Greek text, with a
facing Latin translation. Not only did he find many places where he
thought he needed to correct, tidy up, or emend the Greek manuscripts,
but also he produced his Latin translation directly from the Greek text
afresh – and thus offered a Bible that was outrageously different from
the Vulgate, the Latin text, which was ascribed to Jerome, and used
every day in every church in Europe. The Vulgate was hallowed by tra-
dition (and eventually by the Council of Trent, which declared in ,
with dizzying theological assertiveness, that this Latin translation of the
Greek text was ‘authentic’ (not ‘good’ or ‘reliable’ but ‘authentic’), and that
‘nobody dare or presume to reject it under any pretext’ ), and it was
the basis of all theological discussion from basic sermon to the debates
of university Divines. Indeed, the whole edifice of Medieval theology,
and, consequently, the social order that depended on the structure and
 That a translation is declared ‘authentic’ should give pause: it certainly outraged the Reformers.
For a rather apologetic discussion of authentia, see Sutcliffe ().
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
authority of the Church relied on the status of the Vulgate. It was this text
to which Erasmus offered a corrective. The outrage and scandal which
arose, came about – not unreasonably – not just because of a question
of wording but because of what was at stake in the Word of the Vulgate:
social and moral order itself.
The first edition of the Novum Testamentum was rushed through the press
in . It was lousy with misprints and other typesetters’ errors, and
the notes were often perfunctory. It caused none the less a considerable
stir. Erasmus was sufficiently upset by the printing fiasco – for which
he was upbraided by scholars of the exalted status of Budé, the leading
classicist of his generation – that he rushed to plague-ridden Basel to
produce a second edition personally and as soon as possible. The sec-
ond edition early in  pulled no punches. Egged on by his friends
and supporters, Erasmus added new and even more radical suggestions,
and defended them with more strident polemical scholarship. They
weren’t the sort of changes in translation that might slip by missed.
A whole and crucial sentence of Paul’s Letter to John  , now known as
the ‘Comma Johanneum’ [ John :], he failed to find in any Greek
manuscript – so he deleted it from his text. (We will see a particu-
larly bloody fallout from this later.) For centuries the Gospel of John had
begun In principio erat verbum, ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (as the
usual translation has it). Now Erasmus printed In principio erat sermo, ‘In
the beginning was the speech/conversation.’ Pugnacious, arresting, an
opening designed to shock the reader into reaction.
So what’s with sermo? The scholarship, first: Erasmus’ notes on this
passage reveal that Cyprian, the Church Father, used sermo whenever he
cites this verse. Tertullian, the second- /third-century theologian, who
also uses it, notes that sermo is the ‘customary’ reading. Augustine knew
two textual traditions, both sermo and verbum. (Erasmus – though not his
opponents – is less than exhaustive in his pursuit of countercases, how-
ever.) Why is sermo Erasmus’ choice? Sermo implies, as verbum does not, a
sense of dialogue, which, apart from the humanist love of dialogue, has a
particular theological point. This sense of dialogue or address ‘is essential
 This first edition was called Novum Instrumentum. All subsequent editions were entitled Novum
Testamentum. ‘Rushed through rather than published’, is Erasmus’ own well-known description
of the process.
 See de Jonge (); Bentley (); Margolin () for another test-case. De Jonge believes
(against most) that Erasmus did not mean to edit the Greek text of the New Testament in a
critical manner. His rhetoric of criticism may be different when he treats the New Testament
(rather than Seneca, say), but the deletion of the Comma on grounds of manuscript authority is
hard not to see as an act of ‘textual criticism’.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
to logos as the second person of the Trinity’, whereas ‘verbum . . . if not
so intended originally’ came ‘to support . . . christological and trinitarian
speculation’ of a scholastic type which Erasmus found hard to allow.
More shakily, Erasmus adds that sermo is a masculine noun and thus bet-
ter represents the gender of Christ than a neuter noun (e.g. verbum), and
that sermo has a softer – mollius – sound than verbum. Even these dodgier
arguments, however, articulate what is at stake in this issue of translation:
not just capturing the Greek, but also how the perfection of divinely in-
spired language expresses the world perfectly. God’s language. ‘Softness’
is not just a phonological but a theological gloss. Although Erasmus does
express a further preference for oratio (a third translation: ‘In the begin-
ning was the Address’), sermo has ancient authority and is ‘more apt’,
‘more correct’, ‘more perfect’. Theologically and semantically, sermo
thus is in all ways a better translation of the Greek logos than verbum,
argues Erasmus.
And argue he had to. Any disingenuousness he may have maintained
about this being simply a point of linguistic accuracy or intellectual
enquiry was rapidly dispelled. The Novum Testamentum was praised by
many and the second edition came with a letter of support from the Pope;
but it caused an extraordinary outburst of protest across Europe, and
years of bitter, often violent argument. The translation was proclaimed
an attack on the foundation of the Church and its traditions; the turn back
to the original language of the Gospels was rejected as threatening: for
the authority of the Vulgate was the very grounding of social and moral
understanding. Learning Greek became such an icon in the religious
wars that it could be declared that Greek was ‘the fount of all evil’,
and to know Greek was a ‘heresy’! The Preface of St Jerome’s edition
of the Bible had worried precisely that ‘Which man, be he educated or
uneducated, when he picks up the book and sees that what he is used
to read is different from the saliva he once drank, will not immediately
burst into cry and call me heretic and sacrilegious because I dare to add,
 Jarrott () –.
 Boyle ()  – a full and excellent study of the implications of the choice of sermo. See also
Rummel ().
 Erasmus Annotationum in Evangelium Joannis : , cited and discussed by Boyle () –.
 Adjectives lifted from Apologia de ‘In principio erat sermo’.
 The view of Baechem, cited by Rummel () .
 Erasmus Antibarbari, CWE : ; EE : – [ep ] to Lorenzo Campeggio is a full-scale
description of the escalation of insult into attacks of heresy. So common becomes this attack
that it is parodied in the anonymous farce, Le Farce des Théologastres (C. Longeon ed. [Geneva,
] –), cited by Rummel () : ‘He who speaks Greek is suspect of heresy.’ Bentley
() finds a further root to the slur in the fact that the Greeks were schismatics.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
change, correct something in the old texts?’ Ironically enough, it was
Erasmus who prompted exactly the reaction his master anticipated. So,
how were the battle-lines drawn up?
Erasmus’ mission to have all educated people learn Greek worked
at a personal and institutional level. I have already mentioned the net-
work of letters which trace Erasmus continuing the work of Grocyn,
Linacre, Latimer and Lily, by promoting Greek and by making the story
of a struggle to learn Greek a fundamental myth of initiation into the
Erasmian circle. No Greek, no title of scholar. ‘In no learning are we
anything without Greek’, he writes, ‘all scholarship is blind without
Greek learning’ ; ‘I affirm that with slight qualification the whole of
attainable knowledge lies enclosed within the literary monuments of an-
cient Greece. This great inheritance I will compare to a limpid spring of
undefiled water; it behoves all who are thirsty to drink and be restored.’
(The adaptation of the Gospels’ language of thirst and fulfilment to Greek
texts is the most shocking debt here.) As Latimer replies to Erasmus:
‘You show a remarkable desire to promote Greek learning.’ The word
for ‘desire’ there, ‘desyderium’, puns on Erasmus’ name, Desiderius.
Erasmus’ own name becomes synonymous with his project of promoting
Greek. His example was followed to the letter. Philip Melanchthon, giv-
ing his inaugural lecture in , encourages his students in Wittenburg:
‘Greek learning is especially necessary’, ‘Just give some extra hours to
the Greeks’, and – his professorial slogan – ‘Embrace the Greeks!’
This growing network of powerful friends – ‘a vast mutual admira-
tion society’ – is integral to any picture of humanism at work. Yet it
had lasting and influential institutional effects. Colet’s St Paul’s School
was paradigmatic in its statutes and lesson plans in requiring Greek –
and deeply influential on (even) Wolsey’s self-promoting programme of

 Praefatio in Evangelio: ‘Quis enim doctus pariter vel indoctus, cum in manus volumen adsumpserit et a saliva
quam semel inbibit viderit discrepare quod lectitat, non statim erumpat in vocem, me falsarium me clamans esse
sacrilegum, qui audeam aliquid in veteribus libris addere, mutare, corrigere?’
 EE :  [ep.] to John Colet, December .
 EE :  [ep. ] to Simon Pistorius, September .
 de rat. stud. CWE :  (though I have cited the translation of Woodward, taken from Baldwin
() ). This is a trope of much humanist writing. The return to the source(s), ad fontem/ad
fontes. Interestingly, Valla [Opera .: ed. E. Garin,  vols. (Turin, )] defending himself
in reply to Poggio Bracciolini already asks, ‘Why then did I compare the Latin stream with
the Greek fount?’ For the importance of Valla to Erasmus, see e.g. Bentley (). The attack
on the humanist project can be seen as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century, Hunt
().
 EE :  [ep. ], from William Latimer,  January .
 Keen () , , .  Mason () .
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
establishing educational institutions. Indeed, most, if not all schools
in England by the s specified by statute that Latin and Greek were
the only languages to be spoken by the schoolchildren, ‘whatever they are
doing in earnest or in play’. (As Erasmus wrote to Gilles advising him
about his son: ‘even now let him absorb the seeds of Greek and Latin and
greet his father with charming prattle in two languages’.) The State
became intimately involved with all aspects of the education system to an
increasing degree throughout the sixteenth century. Sir Thomas Smith
(whom we will meet later arguing over the pronunciation of Greek),
Ascham (Elizabeth’s Greek tutor) and other politicians became closely
involved in the founding of schools, the redistribution of land after the
Chantries Act, and the establishment of County Commissions to oversee
educational provision. One result of the mêlée of conflicting purposes
and patronage was the development through the s of an ‘authorized
uniformity’ in education; and ‘in the treatise de ratione studii [“On the
system of education”] by Erasmus is the fundamental philosophy of
the grammar schools in England’. The Erasmian (or, more broadly,
Humanist) turn to Greek and the classics, supported by its educated and
committed administrators, continued to inform the shifting institutional
strategies and practices of school education well into the seventeenth
century and beyond.
It was at university level, however, where the re-invention of Greek
learning caused more trouble, not least because of the vested interests of
the ranks of theologians and scholars continuing the medieval tradition
based on Aquinas and the scholastic debates (in Latin). Erasmus can tell
the story in the mode of triumphal progression to his friend, Bullock, a
Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge:
Thirty years ago nothing was taught in the University of Cambridge except
Alexander, the Parva Logicalia, as they call it, and those old sayings of Aristotle
 Baldwin () is fundamental for material, and there is excellent analysis in Simon () (with
discussion of the influence of St Paul’s –), McConica () and Grafton and Jardine
(), and the still highly influential Bolgar () –.
 This phrase is taken from the statutes of Canterbury School written in .‘This rule of speaking,
always Latin or Greek, is universal in grammar schools of the time, however well or ill it may
have been observed’, Baldwin () .
 EE :  [ep. ], to Peter Gilles, November , a letter of consolation for the death of Gilles’
father.
 See in particular Simon () for this picture of ‘profound change, not only in teaching but
in structure and in relations with the Government’ (McConica () ). McConica ()
and Bolgar () are good on the politics here; Grafton and Jardine () on the coal-face of
teaching.
 Baldwin () ; .
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
and the questions of Scotus [the scholastic curriculum] . . . then arrived knowl-
edge of Greek; then all those authors whose very names were unknown in the
old days even to the brahmins of philosophy, Iarcas-like enthroned. And what,
pray, was the effect of all of this on your University? Why it flourished to such
a tune that it can challenge the first universities of the age . . . 

Erasmus, with an aggressive self-display, is performing the alienating

change of scholarly focus by expecting the reader to understand his
reference to the ‘brahmins of philosophy, Iarcas-like enthroned’. Iarcas
is an Indian sage met in Philostratus’ Life Of Apollonius of Tyana, a second-
century CE text, also referred to by St Jerome, and thus discussed by
Erasmus in his edition of the letters. Erasmus’ slur demands your
engagement in his intellectual ways, travelling back through Jerome to
the Greeks. Such persuasive triumphalism is often rehearsed in a rather
lazy way as the story of the Renaissance’s attractive emergence from the
greyness of Medieval Theology. But that developmental tale hides the
compulsive conflicts that dogged Erasmus’ mission for twenty years and
more.
In the same letter from which I have just quoted, Erasmus tells us of
another rather different reaction in Cambridge to his Greekified Bible
studies and his new edition of the Gospels:
I have heard from trustworthy witnesses that you have one college, steeped in
theology, whose members are regular Areopagites and who are said to have
provided by solemn resolution that no man bring the said volume [the Novum
Testamentum] by horse, boat, wagon, or porter within the curteledge of said
college. I ask you, my learned friend, should one laugh or cry? How their
zeal has led them astray!

This local attack on the leader of the humanists was pronounced

by Richard Pace (‘the typical humanist, the representative of what was
thought to be daring and new in the early years of the sixteenth
century’ ) to be ‘devoid of theology, indeed barely human’ – expressions
he puts tellingly in Greek. But true to his role model, he still ‘laughed
out loud’ when he heard of the pompous college decree.

 EE :  [ep. ], to Henry Bullock, August .

 Jerome Ep ., with Erasmus’ note ad loc: CWE : (text) ; (commentary) .
 EE :  [ep. ], to Henry Bullock, August .
 Mason () .
 EE :  [ep. ], from Richard Pace. ‘Istud collegium tu qeologikÛtaton vocas; sed ego ne qeol»gon
quidem, immo vix ˆnqrÛpinon iudico.’, ‘Effusissimum mihi risum movit . . . ’. Rummel () –
has a nice discussion of the rhetoric of animal abuse in these discussions.
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
More damaging attacks on the Novum Testamentum came from all sides.
Erasmus bitterly writes to Cardinal Wolsey – seeking support from the
powerful, as ever – how even (especially?) those who haven’t read his
work ‘traduce him to the populace with querulous shouting’ and how
‘someone’ – a barely disguised John Standish, a Fransiscan Doctor of
Divinity in London whom Erasmus particularly loathed – in a public
meeting (in fact, the Sermon at St Paul’s Cross) attacked his use of sermo
for verbum. ‘As if John had written in Latin!’, Erasmus explodes, ‘As if
Cyprian, Hilary, Jerome and lots of others had not before me called the
Son of God sermo instead of verbum! As if sermo isn’t a better translation
of the Greek word logos than verbum!’ To Cardinal Campeggio –
enlisting further ecclesiastical power-brokers – he stridently recalls that
‘they keep shouting in a quarrelsome way “Keep your children from
Greek learning! That’s where heresies are born! Don’t touch the books
of that man or that . . . the one who emends the Gospel of John!”’
The attacks of Standish in London (and Egmondanus in Brussels,
and Maier in Germany, and Lefèvre in France and Stunica in Spain
and . . .  ) prompted Erasmus to publish a brief but pungent pamphlet,
‘Apologia for “In principio erat sermo” ’, which he rewrote at greater and
greater length in response to the continuing criticism of his work. In par-
ticular, Edward Lee, future Archbishop of York, wrote a detailed rebuttal
of Erasmus’ scholarly aims and practices (based on the first edition with
its many mistakes). This involved a long and highly involved exchange
between the two men and their supporters. Lee, unlike Standish, was a
scholarly figure who published a volume entitled ‘annotationes ad anno-
tationes Erasmi’ (‘Annotations on the Annotations of Erasmus’). Erasmus
tried to get a look at this book pre-publication; he then quoted evidence
from it in his own second edition, without attribution; then he denounced
it. The row became a cause célèbre. Scornful letters were published (in
collected books too; More, Lupset, other heavy hitters); poems, including

 EE :  [ep. ], to Cardinal Wolsey. See for the report of an extended exchange, EE :
– [ep ] to Hermann Busch,  July  – where Standish calls Erasmus Graeculus iste,
‘that Greekling’. .
 EE : – [ep. ] to Lorenzo Campegio,  February  []. The preface to the
Paraphrasis ad Ephesios, which also contains an extended defence of ‘good learning’.
 Usefully collected and explored in Rummel (); on Stunica see also Bentley () –;
on the theology of Standish see Hughes () : –. For More’s support of Erasmus see the
Letter to Dorp, Letter to Lee, Letter to Oxford, and Letter to a Monk, collected in CWM XV. See now also
Saladin ().
 See Rummel () –; and Coogan ().
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
a whole book making fun of Lee’s name. Perhaps the most extraordi-
nary episode, however, concerns the display of Lee’s book in a Minorite
library. Three days after it went on display, users of the library complained
of a foul smell. It was traced to Lee’ s book which was found to have been
smeared by someone with human shit. Erasmus – one of those to recall
the story not without pleasure some years later – is still quick to add that
he doesn’t know who did it. Erasmus’ lack of regret at such theological
guerilla tactics is matched by the anonymous composers of two poems
which offer epigrammatic encomia to the man who smeared shit on the
pages of Lee (as Nesen writes delightedly to Lupset, sending him the
poems ). The classical paradigm here – always necessary – is Catullus’
famous invective of a rival’s historical prose as ‘cacata carta’,‘pages for
wiping shit.’ Thomas More, a few years on, less than saintly: ‘Luther
has nothing in his mouth but privies, filth and dung . . . Mad friarlet and
privy-minded rascal with his ragings and ravings, with his filth and dung,
shitting and beshitted.’ One reader of Lee seems to have literalized
this language of abuse in a gesture of theological disgust – to the pleasure
of the supporters of Erasmus.
Such escalation of verbal violence (and its turning into more physical
abuse) fuelled the fires of the Reformation. We should remember where
this is all heading. Look at the following dialogue of inquisition recorded
between the Fransiscan friar Cornelius Adrian and an Anabaptist
called Hermann van Flekwyk [Flehwijt], who died at the stake on
 June :
Inquisitor: ‘You have sucked at the poisoned breast of Erasmus . . . But
St John says: ‘There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word
and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.’

 In Ed. Leum quorundam e sodalitate literaria Erphurdiensi Erasmici nominis studiorum epigrammata (Erfurt,
); Epistolae aliquot eruditorum . . . (Antwerp, ). The humour of the Humanists is here
repeatedly placed in service of the aggressive attack on Lee: ‘how I laughed when I read . . .’ is
a topos of the letters, instantiated in the epigrams’ spiteful wit. Other books of polemical letters
also circulated, including even forged letters (Epistolae obscurorum virorum . . . – to which by the
third edition even Hutten contributed a forgery), also full of often scurrilous and lewd humour.
 Nesen in Epistolae aliquot eruditorum . . . (Antwerp: Hillen ); Rummel ()  says that Nesen
‘quotes an epigram’: I have been unable to trace such a quotation in Nesen’s letters, unless his
comment that ‘all that remains is to find another temple to keep the volume in, where it can
be preserved with a liquid a long way from cedar-sap’ is taken as the content of the epigrams.
(Books were preserved with what is called succum cedri.) Nesen tells the story with the qualification
that the Minorites themselves are beyond reproach, but with great pleasure in the details; see the
recollection of Erasmus EE : – [ep. ] March , to Valdes.
 Catullus .  Responsio ad Lutheram (CWM V. i. ).
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus
Anabaptist: I have heard that Erasmus in his Annotationes upon that phrase
shows that this text is not in the Greek original.

Erasmus’ textual criticism has become a martyr’s shield in a murderous

drama. Something to kill and die for. The omission of the ‘Comma
Johanneum’ leads to the stake. I don’t know if this is still within any
scholar’s grandest fantasies of intellectual importance.
In the years following the publication of Erasmus’ Bible up until ,
twenty-five academics and students from Cambridge, Erasmus’ alma
mater, were burnt at the stake for heresy, many pursued by the agents
of More. Many others went into exile. Greek studies also opened
the way for vernacular translations of the Bible (crucial to the develop-
ment of a language of Protestantism, especially in Luther’s Germany)
and thus to further violent response from the authorities. Thomas More
proposed, indeed demanded the burning of Tyndale’s English version,
not just because it was in English but because its choice of vocabu-
lary constituted a Protestant attack on the Catholic Church: to take
one specific and pointed example, More bitterly objected on theolog-
ical grounds to the use of ‘love’ rather than ‘charity’ to translate the
Latin caritas, since ‘love’ implied ‘faith’, whereas ‘charity’ implied ‘good
deeds’, and this privileging of ‘faith’ over action and ritual was a Protes-
tant tenet. (Irony is not quite the term for such violence over those words.)
Though ‘nearly all the first makers of English Protestantism suffered
violent death’, the Cambridge reformers in particular were instrumen-
tal in the developments towards the religious settlement of , which
formally established Protestantism as the religion of England. The tutors
of both Edward VI and of Elizabeth I, first Protestant monarchs, were
Cambridge men, who were closely bonded through their shared com-
mitment to learning Greek and to Protestant theory. They taught the

 Wallace () : – for a full account. The Anabaptist denies any influence from Erasmus
earlier in the dialogue.
 Following the list of Rupp () –.
 On Marian exiles, see Porter () (with list  –) and Garrett () with fuller census  –.
 A partial account in Daniell (), especially –; see also Rupp (); Fox () –;
Marc’hadour and Lawler (). Tyndale, when he writes to More, also appeals to the history
of Greek learning to form a bond with him: ‘Remember ye not how within this thirty year
and far less, and yet dureth until this day, the old barking curs, Dun’s disciples and like draff
called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin and Hebrew’
(Walter () –.). The three languages are, of course, often cited together as a trio.
 Marc’hadour and Lawler () especially –. See CWM VI; CWM VIII – the immense length
of these responses of More show the importance of Tyndale’s threat. Ackroyd ()  calls
it ‘The most important dialogue within English religious discourse, perhaps of any age.’
 Rupp () .  Hudson ().
 Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus 
Prince and Princess how to write and read Greek and, with it, theology.
Greek knowledge and religious reform did go hand in hand, as the op-
ponents of Greek had feared. The authority of the Catholic Church
was undermined. The Cambridge Reformers met in an inn, the White
Horse, opposite King’s, which was known, because of their presence,
as ‘Germany’, or ‘Little Germany’. (The church nearby, St Edward’s,
where the Reformers also spoke, still boasts on the sign by its gate that
it was ‘the cradle of the English Reformation’.) The pub was convenient
because members of King’s, Queens’ and St John’s could ‘enter in on
the backside’. It was raided, but the Reformers had been tipped off
from London and escaped. So, this lovingly preserved and retold story
of revolution would have it, from earnest and precarious conversation
in the pub to control of the State. (A model for so many future cells.) As
John Foxe, with uncustomary understatement, recalls the beginning of
religious war during those nights at the inn: ‘At this time, much trouble
began to ensue.’
These horrifyingly violent consequences of theological difference may
make you less willing to smile with Johannes Jäger’s little satiric drama,
‘Theologists in Council’, set in . Here’s a fragment:
Professor Duplicious: And even if they recommend it a hundred times
I won’t learn Greek and Hebrew. I can hardly read the Psalter – and now they
want us to read these fantasies.
Ed Lee: I never approved of that new fashion, and those new doctors, Jerome,
Augustine, Athanasius. . . . [But] My Greek is progressing and I want to study
Greek still further so that I may traduce Erasmus before the bishops, the Pope
and the cardinals . . . 

It’s hard to tell if such lumpy jokes on the ‘newness’ of Jerome, the mal-
ice of Lee, and the lazy ignorance of the anti-humanist divine were bit-
ingly funny when first published. The play’s conclusion, however, should
still have an uneasy edge. It ends with a solemn decree banning ‘these
new doctrines which have emerged by the counsel of the Devil’. They
must not be spoken of or written about ‘even in private letters’. The
attempt to silence the learning of Greek and its perceived threat to the
religious establishment was indeed repeatedly enacted. Other cases of
such authoritarian attempts to muzzle new questions or criticism are
not hard to summon up. It is still disconcerting, however, to trace this
 Foxe (–) V. – calls it simply ‘Germany’; modern scholars, including the detailed
account of Porter (), ‘Little Germany’.
 Foxe (–) V. .  Ibid.  Rummel () –.