Erasmus in Deventer

The former Latin School in Deventer

Recently I was in Deventer, an old Hanseatic town in the east of the Netherlands. I stayed the night there in a hotel in the centre of the town. Once this hotel was a Latin School. From the 15th century till 1848 boys were educated in the building for religious or worldly functions or for a study at the university. It was not just a school, one among many in Europe, but at the end of the Middle Ages the Latin School in Deventer was one of the most famous schools in Europe north of the Alps and it attracted students from everywhere. One of them was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who lived then in Gouda. His father wanted the best education for him and so he sent his son to Deventer. Erasmus was eight years old, when he arrived there, and since he was yet a little boy, his mother went with him.
Not long before Erasmus went to Deventer, the Latin School had got a new headmaster: Alexander Hegius (1439/40-1498). Traditionally, at schools like the Latin School in Deventer, students were taught medieval Latin: Latin as it was used in the religious books of the time and as it was spoken by the clergymen. The method to learn it was memorizing. The students had to learn rhymes with the rules of the language by heart; especially the Doctrinal, a long didactic poem in Latin describing the Latin grammar.
Once a student knew the Doctrinal by heart he was supposed to know Latin. But did he understand Latin? He didn’t, so Hegius. Therefore, Hegius started to make his own teaching material. He began to criticize the Doctrinal and he introduced modern teaching methods that were already used in Italy. But he did more. He replaced the corrupt medieval Latin till then learned at school by the Latin of the classical writers, such as Cicero and Vergil. The students learned also to practically use this Latin, and they learned about the classical culture. Moreover, Hegius introduced a new subject: Old Greek. He was the first to do so in northern Europe. And last but not least: Hegius learned his students to think. Texts could contain mistakes for all kinds of reasons, so Hegius. To find out whether this was the case, you had to compare a text with other versions of the same text and with other sources, in order to analyse what was true and what wasn’t.
The new educational approach made the Deventer Latin School famous in Europe north of the Alps and it attracted students from everywhere. And so it happened that also Erasmus’s father decided that his son had to be educated at this school. Nevertheless, Erasmus was educated in the old way; only the two highest classes were taught by Hegius himself. The lower classes still basically followed the old teaching method, but this didn’t make that Erasmus was cut off from the new development. Erasmus was a curious boy, so once he knew that the highest classes of his school were taught with different methods and were taught different stuff, he asked the older students what it was. This must not have been difficult, for students in the higher classes often had to teach the lower classes, so contact was easily made. In addition, on certain occasions Hegius held free lectures that everybody could attend. These lectures made a deep impression on Erasmus, as we know from his letters and notes.
Erasmus must have been looking forward to be taught by Hegius himself in the highest classes of the Latin School. It didn’t happen. When Erasmus was in the third class (in those days the first class was the highest class in a school), there was an epidemic of plague in Deventer, which killed his mother. Soon thereafter his father died of grief. Erasmus’s guardians were more interested in his inheritance (which must have been quite big) than in the well-being of the boy. Erasmus was sent to a monastery. Even so, thanks to his education in Deventer, Erasmus became one of the most important exponents of the Renaissance, if not the most important. Once he had escaped the monastic life, he further developed Hegius’s teaching methods, he translated classical authors in order to make them known to modern man, and he became a prominent philologist and Bible critic and made a new, critical translation of the New Testament. Would Erasmus ever have reached that level and ever have become that famous, if he hadn’t had his education at the Latin School in Deventer? 

Source
Sandra Langereis, Erasmus dwarsdenker. Een biografie. Amsterdam, De Bezìge Bij, 2021.