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Beat R. JENNY, « Tod, Begräbnis und Grabmal des Erasmus von Rotterdam » (Death, Burial and Epitaph of Erasmus), Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 86, 2 (1986) pp. 61-73, with 3 appendices (pp. 74-85) and 129 notes (pp. 85-104).
BOTH Rotterdam, where he was born, and Basle, where he died, have always had an extra reason to honour Erasmus. In 1986 old facts came under new light. At Rotterdam attention was paid to the discovery, made in Italy in 1983, of a scribe Gerardus, son of Helyas, from Rotterdam, who at Fabriano in 1457/58 finished the writing of two manuscripts with thanks for his assistance to the martyr St. Erasmus. In all probability this scribe was the man who was to become Erasmus' father. ' And at Basle, the catalogue of the exhibition in the Historisches Museum revealed that in 1928, as a result of earlier mistakes, the wrong grave had been opened 2, and that in 1974 a Matsysmedal, found in another grave, had led to the discovery of the real skeleton of Erasmus. 3 These circumstances prompted Dr Jenny, who is the successor of Alfred Hartmann as editor of the famous Amerbach Korrespondenz, to make a thorough study of the intricate problems concerning Erasmus' death together with what happened before and after that. This required a fresh reading of the many documents, while some as yet unknown were found.
Besides, the paper to which I call attention here treats a subject handled in 1958 by Cornells Reedijk in his, for these problems fundamental, article « Das Lebensende des Erasmus » (The end-of-life of Erasmus) 4, followed in 1965 by my « Die letzten Worte des Erasmus » (The ast words of Erasmus). s These articles, - both, perhaps not altogether remarkably, written at Rotterdam - serve Jenny as a starting-point and base, and receive his critical attention.
The result is a well-balanced and on the whole convincing account of this « political fact of the first order » : Erasmus' coming back and his being granted the rights of a guest, living and working in Froben's house as in a extraterritorial area, dying there and being buried. The text ends with a meditation on Erasmus, who, with other actors in the drama,...