Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutch writer and humanist who was born in Rotterdam. Before his death in 1536, he became the chief interpreter to northern Europe of the intellectual currents of the Italian Renaissance.

Erasmus, the illegitimate son of a priest and a physician's daughter, was educated in very strict monastic schools in Deventer, Hertogenbosch and he was ordained a priest in 1492. While employed by the bishop of Cambrai, he studied Scholastic philosophy and Greek at the University of Paris. Finding religious life distasteful, he sought secular employment, and he later received papal dispensation to live and dress as a secular scholar.

Erasmus was the first editor of the New Testament, and examined the past from a historical-critical perspective, in which he often voiced criticism of the so-called "classics". His efforts were important to bring additional reform and empiricist beliefs to the renaissance mind.

In 1499, Erasmus moved from city to city working as a tutor and lecturer and constantly writing and searching out ancient manuscripts. He maintained a voluminous correspondence, more than 1500 of his letters survive, with some of the most prominent figures of his time (Erasmus himself taught Greek at the University of Cambridge). Through his associations Erasmus helped establish humanism in England effecting the ideas of Francis Bacon and later empiricists, especially in regard to the application of classical studies to Christian learning.