Late at night, Robert goes to the circus and finds a fabulous balloon machine, with which he creates unusual balloons.

This volume includes Erasmus’ correspondence for the months April 1532 to April 1533, a period in which he feared a religious civil war in Germany. In his desire to move somewhere far enough from Germany to be safe and yet not so far that an old man could not undertake the journey, Erasmus eventually decided to accept the invitation from Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands, to return to his native Brabant. In March 1533, the terms of Erasmus’ return were settled and in July they were formally approved by the emperor. But by this time Erasmus’ fragile health had already declined to the point that he could not undertake the journey, and he would never recover sufficiently to do so. The works published in the months covered by this volume include the eighth, much-enlarged edition of the Adagia, and the Explanatio symboli, the catechism that delighted Erasmus’ followers but gave Martin Luther much ammunition for a brutal attack on him in his Epistola de Erasmo Roterodamo of 1534.

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

The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning could command public admiration without the need for authorial self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself—the historical as opposed to the figural individual—was a brilliant, maverick innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating study of Erasmus but also a bold account of a key moment in Western history, a time when it first became possible to believe in the existence of something that could be designated "European thought."

At the beginning of this volume, Erasmus leaves Louvain to live in Basel. Weary from the many controversies reflected in the letters of the previous volumes, he is also anxious to see the annotations to his third edition of the New Testament through Johann Froben's press. Above all he fears that pressure from the imperial court in the Netherlands will force him to take a public stand against Luther. Erasmus completes a large number of works in the span of this volume, including the Paraphrases on Matthew and John, two new expanded editions of the Colloquies, an edition of De conscribendis epistolis, two apologiae against his Spanish detractors, and editions of Arnobius Junior and Hilary of Poitiers. But the predominant theme of the volume remains 'the sorry business of Luther.' The harder Erasmus persists in trying to adhere to a reasonable course between Catholic and reforming zealots, the more he finds himself 'a heretic to both sides.' His Catholic critics appear the more dangerous. Among them are the papal nuncio Girolamo Aleandro, who is bent on discrediting him at both the imperial and papal courts as a supporter of Luther; the Spaniard Diego López Zúñiga, who compiles a catalogue of Blasphemies and Impieties of Erasmus of Rotterdam; and the Carmelite Nicholaas Baechem, who denounces Erasmus both in public sermons and at private 'drinking-parties.' Erasmus' refusal to counsel severity against the Lutherans is motivated chiefly by concern for peace and the common good of Christendom, and not by any tender regard for Luther and the other reformers. Still, many of the letters in this volume testify to his growing aversion to the reformers, and we see him moving perceptibly in the direction of his eventual public breach with them. A special feature of this volume is the first fully annotated translation of Erasmus' Catalogues Iucubrationum (Ep 1341 A), an extremely important document for the study of Erasmus' life and works and of the controversies they aroused. Volume 9 of the Collected Works of Erasmus series.

These 129 letters centre primarily on Erasmus' continuing struggle with his Catholic critics, especially those in Spain and France, and on Erasmus' growing criticism of the Protestant reform movement.