Desiderius Erasmus

Movable-type printing spread across Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century, and by the early 1500s presses in Venice, Basel, Paris, and Antwerp could produce books in quantities no scriptorium had ever managed. A scholar could now see his work read from Spain to Poland within a year.

Erasmus made the press his instrument. His editions, translations, satires, and letters circulated in tens of thousands of copies, and the Greek New Testament he published in 1516 put a tool in the hands of every reformer. Luther's pamphlets proved the same point a few years later: the press made ideas that had once been confined to a few minds impossible to suppress.

The humanists of the Renaissance believed that the culture of Greece and Rome had been buried under centuries of commentary and that the way to recover it was to read the original texts in their original languages. They learned Greek, collected manuscripts, and developed the philological tools needed to establish what an author had actually written.

Erasmus applied those tools to Christian scripture as well as to classical literature. His editions of the New Testament and the Church Fathers, and his Adages and Colloquies, taught a generation how to compare manuscripts, weigh variants, and translate with precision. The method outlasted the theology and became the foundation of modern textual scholarship.