De Causis Linguae Latinae (Lyon, 1540) / Des causes de la langue latine. Jules-César Scaliger. Ed. and trans. Pierre Lardet, Geneviève Clerico, and Bernard Colombat. 2 vols. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 594. Geneva: Droz, 2018. 2,222 pp. $222.
pretive work—no less responsive to Erasmus’s texts, but less anxious for them—can proceed. This is also of course the moment to reopen some of the fundamental questions of authorial intent and method that editors and annotators of the Paraphrases have repeatedly had to address along the way. One of them concerns the intended readership of these singularly Erasmian texts. Introducing a set of conference proceedings some years ago, I called them “virtual scripts for preaching” (cited here at 5n26). “The Paraphrases are aimed at a readership of the more, or less educated clergy,” Bloemendal infers (3). But it is not clear from the passages adduced that only clergy are in view, and the wider franchise of theologizing modeled—so disconcertingly to the likes of Bede—by the Ratio Verae Theologiae (1518/19) suggests otherwise. On balance, Bateman’s choice in favor of “students or accomplished theologians, clergy or laity” (ASD VII-6, 1) still looks safer. A second critical question concerns the use made by Erasmus in this case of “the compilation works Glossa ordinaria (edited as Biblia cum glossa, including the commentary by Nicolaus Lyranus), Thomas Aquina[s]’s Catena aurea and Beda’s [i.e., Bede’s] In Lucam expositio” (34), Bede’s commentary being also essentially a compilation. Differing from Phillips, Bloemendal argues, first, that Erasmus as a rule only checked “mainstream exegesis” after he had made a draft of his paraphrase of a passage and, second, that the works that he used for such checking were “primarily” the compilation works listed above, rather than texts of the church fathers such as he elsewhere (e.g., in the Ratio Verae Theologiae) urged his readers to consult at first hand. While Erasmus’s recourse to such works has long been recognized, Bloemendal’s assessment of their role entails a significant revision of the working model for the composition of the Paraphrases formerly proposed by Bateman on the basis of a suggestion made by Irena Backus (see ASD VII-6, 13, cited ASD VII-2, 26–27). The means of verifying that assessment are now—or, in the case of the rest of this ordo, soon will be—before us.