Excerpt from Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterdami, Vol. 1: 1484-1514 In dealing with the text it has been impossible to attempt any uniformity of orthography. The sources for the cor respondence are various, with very different degrees of authority: original letters in the handwriting of Erasmus and his friends; letters copied by his servant-pupils; letters copied by contemporaries or by later hands; books printed in his lifetime, where the orthography varies considerably according to the practice of the printer; and books printed under the direction of later scholars, whose critical standards unhappily allowed them to adopt the orthography deemed correct in their own day in preference to that of the originals. To construct from these various sources some attempt at a standard orthography for Erasmus himself might have been possible, though laborious; for his multitudinous corre spondents it was entirely out of the question. I have contented myself with the endeavour to reproduce with fidelity the earliest source available in each case, whether manuscript or printed book, except where obvious deprava tion of the text has rendered correction necessary; or where on rare occasions too close adherence to the original, especially in the use of the termination -e for -se, would have caused obscurity. Contractions and abbreviations I have not at tempted to preserve; and in the forms of letters the long 8 is discarded, forj (usually only in capitals or ij) i is printed, and for u I have adopted the form v as initial, u as medial or final, according to the practice of Erasmus himself and most of his friends. In punctuation, whilst adhering as far as possible to the earliest text, I have allowed myself a free hand; and in the use of capital letters only modern require ments have been considered The practice of the Renaissance in writing Greek differed so widely from our own that I have made no attempt to reproduce it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.