It is also worth noting that in the seventeenth century, Thomas Bodley, when commissioning the historical friezes for the library reading room at Oxford, included Erasmus with other figures who established Protestantism in England. ― Gregory D. Dodds[1]
I am constantly more and more impressed, when I see Erasmus growing greater as he advances in years, and showing himself every day in a new and more exalted character . . . Therefore, wherever you are, you so live as to seem everywhere in Christendom, and will continue to live by the immortality of your fame and the noble monuments you will leave behind you. ― John Watson, lecturer at Cambridge[2]
I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translated into all languages so that they could be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish but by Turks and Saracens . . . Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at his plow, the weaver some part of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveller lighten the weariness of his journey with stories of this kind! ― Desiderius Erasmus[3]
There has been a historic tendency, when reading and interpreting the political form of the long English Reformation of the sixteenth century, to excessively focus on Henry VIII, Mary, Edward VI and Elizabeth. There has also been a tendency, from a theological perspective, to keep the eyes fixed on Bilney, Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker and lesser thinkers and activists of reform. Then, there has been much work done on the various prayer books that shaped emerging Anglican liturgical life. Needless to say, much fine research has been done on the various denominations that came into being at the time, also. There has also been a commitment by many protestant reformers to see John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384) as ‘the morning star of the reformation’. There is a serious blind spot in approaching the English Reformation from these various angles and perspectives, though.
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[1] Gregory D. Dodds, ‘An Accidental Historian: Erasmus and the English History of the Reformation’, Church History, vol. 82, no. 2, June 2013, pp. 273–292, at p. 280, n. 27.
[2] John Watson, letter to Desiderius Erasmus, August 1516. Desiderius Erasmus, The Epistles of Erasmus, from His Earliest Letters to His Fifty-First Year, Arranged in Order of Time: English Translations from the Early Correspondence, with a Commentary Confirming the Chronological Arrangement and Supplying Further Biographical Matter, ed. Francis Morgan Nichols, 2 vols., London, Longmans, Green, and Company, 1904, vol. 2, pp. 334–335.
[3] From the Paraclesis—see the English version of Olin in Desiderius Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings of Erasmus, ed. John C. Olin, 3rd edition, New York, Fordham University Press, 1987, p. 101.