Erasmus

Erasmus

Erasmus
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 6 to 8
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	7.91

Vocabulary

	challenging words:		accessible, further, spells, influential, plague, thinker, translation, scholar, dialogues, scholarly, basis, secretary, blindly, death, leader, maintain
	content words:		Martin Luther, King James Bible, In Praise, Catholic Church, Christian Knight, Roman Catholics, Since Erasmus

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Erasmus
By Sharon Fabian

¹     Erasmus, a Dutch scholar of the Renaissance, was a leader of the Humanists. The Humanists were philosophers who searched for the truth. They believed that people could use their powers of reason to discover the difference between right and wrong. They studied ideas from Greek and Latin writings of the past and applied what they learned to problems of their day.

²     Erasmus was born in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. He was raised by his parents until his teenage years, when both of his parents died of the plague. After their death, he continued his education and then became a Catholic priest. He took the vows to become an Augustine monk, but he found that he disagreed with the ideas that the monks lived by. When the opportunity arose to work as secretary to the Bishop of Cambray, he left the monastery, never to return. Eventually, the bishop sent Erasmus to Paris to further his education.

³     Erasmus sometimes worked as a teacher too, but it was important to him to maintain his independence from any one school of thought. He wanted to develop his own ideas and then write about them so that others could learn from what he had discovered.

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