At his peak, Desiderius Erasmus accounted for up to a fifth of all book sales across a continent, yet he began life in the late 1460s as the illegitimate child of a Catholic priest, orphaned by plague in 1483, cheated of his inheritance, and forced by poverty into permanent vows at an Augustinian canonry. This episode traces how his mastery of Latin became his ticket out, first as secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai and then to Paris and England, where he found intellectual equals in Thomas More and John Colet before losing every coin he owned to English customs officials.

We explore his principle of ad fontes, back to the sources, his satirical bestseller The Praise of Folly, his philosophy of Christ in the Enchiridion, and the Greek New Testament that exposed translation errors in the Vulgate, including the shift from do penance to change  ...