Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536) was born in Rotterdam, educated by the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer, and became an Augustinian canon and priest before leaving the cloister for a life of scholarship. He lived and worked in Paris, England, Italy, Louvain and Basel, and was the most famous classical and biblical scholar of his age. His works include the Enchiridion (Handbook of the Christian Soldier, 1503), The Praise of Folly (1511), the Adages and Colloquies, and the first published Greek New Testament (1516), with a new Latin translation and notes. He spent his last years chiefly in Basel and Freiburg and died in Basel in 1536.
On Free Will, published in Latin at Basel in September 1524 as De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (a discourse or comparison of passages concerning free will), is Erasmus's public answer to Martin Luther on the question of whether the human will has any part in salvation. Erasmus had long hesitated to write against Luther, whose criticism of abuses he partly shared, but by 1524 he was pressed by friends, princes and churchmen to declare himself, and he chose the one doctrine on which he thought Luther had gone furthest: Luther's statement of 1520 that free will after the Fall is a name without a reality.
