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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2009
It is a great honour to have been invited to present this year's Erasmus Lecture to the distinguished plenary audience of the Academia Europaea. To deliver a lecture connected with Erasmus, this eminent European humanist, imposes an obligation from which greater minds than myself would shrink in diffidence. On the other hand, exactly such a challenge may encourage one to address a topic grand enough to be really worthy of this illustrious scholar, who probably, more than anyone else in his time, was able to bridge the manifold chasms which are—since earliest times—both the strength and the predicament of not only the intellectual history of Europe: