A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [64]
LIKE ITS PREDECESSOR, Iulius exclusus was a succès fou; an Antwerp humanist wrote the author that it was “for sale everywhere here. Everyone is buying it, everyone is talking of it.” The Curia, alarmed now, urged Erasmus to lay his pen aside and spend the rest of his life in repentant piety. It was too late. That same year, 1514, saw the appearance of Familiarium colloquiorum formulae in the first of its several editions. Eventually the Colloquia familiaria, as it came to be called, became the bulkiest and most loosely organized of his works, and it is the most difficult to characterize. Essentially it was a miscellaneous collection of random thoughts; the full title, Forms of Familiar Conversations, by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Useful Not Only for Polishing a Boy’s Speech But for Building His Character, suggests his lack of a theme. Written in idiomatic, chatty Latin, these colloquies included a peculiar blessing to be bestowed on pregnant women—“Heaven grant that the burden you carry may have as easy an exit as it had an entry”—together with encouragement of circumcision, advice on the proper response when someone sneezed, paeans to piety, discouragement of the burning of heretics, and an endless, tedious colloquy between “The Young Man and the Harlot,” at the end of which the prostitute, perhaps exhausted, agrees to abandon her calling. There were off-color jokes, droll observations on the irrationality of human behavior, an endorsement of the institution of marriage, et cetera, et cetera.
Had that been all, his public, disappointed, would have left the work unread. But Erasmus had not finished savaging the Church and her clergy. An eighteenth-century Protestant translator later wrote that he knew of “no book fitter to read which does, in so delightful and instructing a manner, utterly overthrow almost all the Popish Opinions and Superstitions.” Certainly that seemed the author’s intent. He attacked priestly greed, the abuse of excommunication, miracles, fasting, relic-mongering, and lechery in the monasteries. Women were urged to keep a safe distance from “brawny, swill-bellied monks. … Chastity is more endangered in the cloister than out of it.”
Once more, however, he leveled his heaviest artillery on the Vatican. His contempt for Julius’s wars was venomous—“as if the Church had any enemies as pestilential as impious pontiffs who by their silence allow Christ to be forgotten, enchain [him] by their mercenary rules … and crucify him afresh by their scandalous life!” Depravity and corruption still outraged him: “As to these Supreme Pontiffs, who take the place of Christ,” he wrote, “were wisdom to descend upon them, it would inconvenience them! … It would lose them all that wealth and honor, all those possessions, triumphal progresses, offices, dispensations, tributes and indulgences,” requiring instead vigils, prayer, meditation, “and a thousand troublesome tasks of that sort.” In a private letter he wrote, “The monarchy of Rome, as it is now, is a pestilence to Christendom.”
In the first rush after publication, twenty-four thousand copies of the colloquies vanished from bookshops, and between then and midcentury only the Bible outsold it. There was a continuing demand for all his popular works. In 1520 an Oxford bookseller noted that a third of all the volumes he sold were written by Erasmus. Forty editions of Encomium moriae were published in the author’s lifetime, and as late as 1632 Milton found the book “in everyone’s hand” at Cambridge. It was this popularity, not the barbs themselves, which outraged those ecclesiastics who saw themselves as enforcers of the holy faith. Like every writer who has reached a large audience, he was dismissed for pandering