Osborne, Woolf Seminar:More Jacob's Room tips: Erasmus
The character Erasmus Cowan is named after a Christian theologian of the 16th century. Desiderius Erasmus. b. Oct. 27, 1469, Rotterdam, Holland [now in The Netherlands] d. July 12, 1536, Basel, Switzerland.
According to a biography provided by the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame, "Erasmus was a humanist who was the greatest scholar of the northern Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament, and also an important figure in patristics and classical literature. Using the philological methods pioneered by Italian humanists, Erasmus helped lay the groundwork for the historical-critical study of the past, especially in his studies of the Greek New Testament and the Church Fathers. His educational writings contributed to the replacement of the older scholastic curriculum by the new humanist emphasis on the classics. By criticizing ecclesiastical abuses, while pointing to a better age in the distant past, he encouraged the growing urge for reform, which found expression both in the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Finally, his independent stance in an age of fierce confessional controversy--rejecting both Luther's doctrine of predestination and the powers that were claimed for the papacy--made him a target of suspicion for loyal partisans on both sides and a beacon for those who valued liberty more than orthodoxy."
For more information on Erasmus, visit the Erasmus Institute's website at http://www.nd.edu/~erasmus/
Questions to consider: how does this reference to Erasmus pertain to the novel? Is Erasmus's resistance to orthodoxy like Jacob's? Notice how Jacob and his fellow Cambridge students are drawn to the classics and think of "a better age in the distant past" in contrast to the paradoxical combination of rigidity and disintegration in the modern world they see around them. Also notice the irony in the character Erasmus Cowan. He is a brilliant, gifted translator and scholar, "Virgil's representative among us," and yet he is chubby and frail at the same time. He is hardly glorious or noble-looking, yet "language" is "wine upon his lips," and (later),
"Such is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it can. . ." (29) The light, the illumination, of knowledge and beauty that comes to us through languages, symbols, figures, history, etc. must come through precisely such fallible and broken vessels as Erasmus Cowan, or Jacob Flanders, or indeed even Virginia Woolf, in whose hands language is an instrument of all these things.
Julian the
ApostateJacob's Room as Bildungsroman The Great War and
"In Flanders Fields"Jacob's Room
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