This Norton Critical Edition provides a wide selection of Erasmus�s writings, translated from the Latin into
fresh, modern English.
Besides the celebrated Praise of Folly, Robert M. Adams has included the political "Complaint of Peace,"
the brutal antipapal satire "Julius Excluded from Heaven," two versions of Erasmus�s important preface
to the Latin translation of the New Testament, and a selection both serious and comic of his Colloquies and his
letters. Adams has made these selections to emphasize the humane, rather than the doctrinaire, side of the first
and arguably greatest humanist.
Critical commentary is provided in essays by H. R. Trevor-Roper, R. S. Allen, J. Huizinga, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul
Oskar Kristeller, and Robert M. Adams.
Also included are a Chronology of Erasmus�s life and a Selected Bibliography.
THE EDITOR ROBERT M. ADAMS is Professor of English Emeritus, University of California at Los Angeles. He has also taught
at Wisconsin, Rutgers, and Cornell. He is the author of many books, including Ikon: John Milton and the Modern
Critics, Strains of Discord, Surface and Symbol, The Land and Literature of England, and, most recently, Shakespeare--The
Four Romances. He has edited six other Norton Critical Editions, including The Prince, Candide, Second Edition,
and Utopia, the texts of which he also translated. He is a contributing editor of The Norton Anthology of English
Literature.
