- Lived:
- 1466 (the year is contested; possibly 1467 or 1469) – 1536 · Rotterdam, Paris, England, Venice, Basel — everywhere and nowhere
- Tradition:
- Christian humanism; the Northern Renaissance
- The Big Idea:
- Go back to the sources. Corrupt texts make corrupt religion; clean grammar, honest scholarship, and a little laughter can reform the world without burning it down.
- In their words:
- "I laid a hen's egg; Luther hatched a bird of quite a different kind."
- If you remember one thing:
- Europe's first printing-press celebrity spent his life refusing to join either army in the great religious war of his age — and was condemned by both, which may be the strongest evidence that he was standing somewhere real.