Desiderius Erasmus

Abstract

Erasmus’s friendship with Justus Ludovicus Decius, an Alsatian, who had amassed a great fortune in Poland and settled in Cracow, becoming a liberal patron of the arts, led to the Dutch scholar’s writing a treatise on the Pater Noster or Precatio Dominica in septem portiones distributa (1523). It was written at Decius’s request after his first meeting with Erasmus at Cracow in 1522. Soon after the latter returned to Basel, he completed the Precatio, referring to it in the dedicatory epistle to Decius as ‘opus recens ac modo natum et mox excusum’ [a recent work but lately born and hurried through the press]. The theme was chosen to accent the pressing need to spread the doctrines of Christianity among the pagans, and also the Turks, who were a continual threat to the Church.

For biographical sketch, see pp. 55–7.