SOURCE: A letter to Henry Cornelius Agrippa on April 21, 1533, in A Renaissance Treasury, edited by Hiram Haydn and John Charles Nelson, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1953, pp. 394-95.

A Dutch classical scholar, philosopher, writer, and translator, Erasmus is one of the dominant intellectual figures of Renaissance Europe. His most famous work, The Praise of Folly (1509), written in Latin, is a powerful satire on clerical hypocrisy. Here, he praises Agrippa's On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences, but warns him of the dangers of becoming embroiled in disputes with the monks who considered his work heretical.

I wrote to you at first in few words, to the effect that the doctrine of your book on the Vanity of Sciences had pleased some of the most learned in these parts. I had not then read the book, but soon afterwards, having obtained it, I bade a famulus read it aloud at...