Erasmus sent his exposition of Psalm 85 to John Longland, bishop of Lincoln,¹ in August 1528. The dedicatory letter accompanying the work makes it clear that Erasmus had written it in response to a request from Longland, to whom he had already, in 1525, dedicated his commentary on Psalm 4, and, in 1527, his translation of some of² Athanasius’ works.³ It is not however clear from the letter why Erasmus had selected Psalm 85 as his subject, rather than continuing with the series of commentaries on the psalms, starting with Psalm 1⁴ and using a different genre for his exposition...

Towards the end of 1529, Erasmus received a letter from one ‘Gerard the Frisian,’ in the employ of Thomas Boleyn, the English nobleman and courtier, requesting that his master might receive an exposition of Psalm 22/3, ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’¹ Though Boleyn was later described by Erasmus as ‘among the foremost in learning,’² we may doubt whether he would have found a lengthy Latin text easy reading; to Gerard’s letter he appends the following: ‘I pray yow gyff credyt to thys, and pardon me thow I wryt nat at thys tyme to yow my selff.’ Though he wrote with...

Sultan Suleiman abandoned his siege of Vienna on the night of 14/15 October 1529, having failed to force the gateway to the Hapsburg Empire. Christendom had in fact survived its sternest test at the hands of the Muslim invader; the Ottoman Turks were never again to come so close to breaking into western Europe. Naturally, Erasmus and his contemporaries could not foresee this and knew little of the disturbances to the east that prevented Suleiman from pressing home or renewing the attack; for the next few months, dire prophecies and nervous uncertainty abounded in the West.¹ In this atmosphere of...

TheEnarratio psalmi 33was written in the winter of 1530–1, following what Erasmus describes as a period of apathy and ‘writer’s block’ subsequent to his illness of the preceding summer.¹ It was composed as a gift for Konrad von Thüngen, prince-bishop of Würzburg, a man active in the religious politics of the day and a patron of scholars.² The choice of psalm was not Konrad’s, nor was it left to Erasmus; the suggestion came from a mysterious ‘other’ or ‘others,’³ most likely someone close to Konrad and perhaps a mutual connection such as Daniel Stiebar (Epp 2069, 2079,...