The Frisian humanist Rudolph Agricola (1443-1485) is rightly famous for single-handedly bringing the Italian Renaissance to the North. Rudolph Agricola: Six Lives and Erasmus’ Testimonies offers for the first time six biographies of Agricola, carefully edited, translated and annotated, providing a vivid image of cultural and intellectual life in the fifteenth century.
The addition of fifty of the most important testimonies from Erasmus helps to evaluate the significance of Agricola’s work for the emerging humanism of the North. This edition of sources supplements the volume of Agricola’s letters (BLN, 2002) and fills a gap in our knowledge about a great man of letters and corrects a number of persistent misconceptions in modern scholarship.

Fokke Akkerman has published extensively on Neo-Latin, especially on Spinoza and early Dutch Humanism