Ghosting the Reform of Dialectic: Erasmus and Agricola Again

Abstract

In an earlier piece of work I have begun to tell the story of how Erasmus master-minded the recovery, editing, commentary and circulation of the text of Rudolph Agricola’s key work in dialectic, the De inventione dialectica.¹ The charismatic and inspirational nature of Rudolph Agricola’s example in the Low Countries, as the first native-born scholar to bring Italian humanism back to northern Europe, is not in doubt. But the model he offered was largely as a living figure: at his death he left few, and relatively inconsequential published works, and little (as it emerged) suitable for publication by those concerned to convince an international readership of the eminence and stature of their greatest home-grown humanist.² In the book of which both the present and the previous piece of textual detective work form a part, I show how Erasmus intervened repeatedly in the history of Agricola’s works, to generate, and then to consolidate, a reputation in print to match the example which the great Frisian humanist had estabished during his lifetime. I also argue that this was no disinterested move on Erasmus’s part: that at the height of Erasmus’s own publishing career, Agricola’s reputation served to provide the institutionally non-aligned Erasmus with a respectable intellectual pedigree as the inheritor of a ‘tradition’ of northern humanism — as the chosen son on whom Agricola’s mantle had fallen.³