Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters

This 2005 book examines how the religious search for meaning shaped contemporary assumptions about friendship, gender, reading and writing.

Constance M. Furey (Author)

9780521103435, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 December 2008

272 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.4 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Furey … is to be congratulated for her brevity and clarity, and her audience of intellectual and religious historians should benefit from reading this book.' Sixteenth Century Journal

Though the paradigm of modernist progression has been challenged on many fronts, Erasmus and other sixteenth-century figures are still commonly viewed as people who led the transition from a religious Middle Ages to a more godless modern era. Erasmus, Contarini and the Religious Republic of Letters, published in 2005, complicates this transition by analysing a unique realm of spiritualised scholarship that cannot fit easily into any conventional intellectual chronology. By analysing the lives, work, and correspondence of Erasmus, Thomas More, Margaret More Roper, Reginald Pole, Gasparo Contarini, and Vittoria Colonna, this book demonstrates how these Catholic men and women of letters created a distinctive kind of religious community rooted in friendship and spiritualised scholarship. By spanning the too frequently respected gap between humanist reformers in northern and southern Europe, the book uncovers a widespread, if previously less visible, network that exhibited concerns we still grapple with today.

1. A new kind of religious life
2. Creating an alternative community: spiritual values and the search for meaning
3. The spiritual quest: reading and writing about God and salvation
4. Necessary relationships: desire for God and each other
5. Defining the ideal: words of praise for fools and bishops, women and martyrs
6. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Christian theology [HRCM]