ABSTRACT
Erasmus was born in Rotterdam on 27 October 1466, the child of Gerard of Gouda, a priest, and Margaret, daughter of a physician of Zevenbergen. Named for St Erasmus, the martyred Bishop of Campania, his illegitimacy troubled him so much that as late as 1516 he sought papal dispensation for the circumstances of his birth. Colloquies were useful for the kind of teaching which Erasmus advocated. Erasmus left England in 1514 for Basle, where the great printing-house of Johann Froben was prepared to publish at its own expense his Letters of St Jerome, which had been a cherished project for twenty years. In the 1520s as Erasmus continued to move around, from Louvain to Basle to Freiburg, and in the 1530s when he returned to Basle, he remained a figure with a great reputation and continued to publish prolifically. Erasmus also revised Lily's textbook of Latin syntax which ultimately became the Eton Latin grammar.
