A Brill Calendar: April 11

Percy Stafford Allen Honoured

Few academic ceremonies reflect the spirit of the age in which they take place as neatly as when a Rector of a ‘Universitas Studiosorum’ grants (with due pomp & circumstance) a ‘Doctor’ title ‘Honoris Causa’.

In the history of Leyden University it is seldom that this title was given for better reasons than when Percy Stafford Allen (London, July 7 1869 – Oxford, June 16 1933) was donned with the ceremonial insignia of the Faculty of Language, Literature & Philosophy on April 11, 1922. Since 1893 – when barely 24 years of age – Allen’s life was one of service to the works of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, and of the vast correspondence of the Renaissance humanist; a task Allen was busy with till 1933.

Following a suggestion of his master & hero, James Anthony Froude (1818 – 1894), a historian as eccentric as influential and loved by the general public, young Allen embarked on a new edition of the sea of letters authored by the first intellectual who earned an independent and dignified existence by the fruits of his quill; by using two copies of the obsolete London Edition of 1642 as a guide.

Volume I of the series, entitled ‘Opus Epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami denuo recognitum et auctum’ came off the Oxford Clarendon Press in 1906. As from Volume III, the Editor-in-Chief listed his wife as a contributor; and Mrs Allen continued her husband’s labour of love also after Volume VII (1928), the last one published during her husband’s short life.

Just before the 20th century began, Allen had matriculated in Corpus Christi Oxon. In 1924, almost a generation later, he was elected President of the College he loved. After the pageantry and ‘laudationes’ at the Leyden Rapenburg of April 11 1922 many learned observers made disparaging comments about the ‘indolent’ Dutch scholars, oblivious of obligations to the nation’s scholarly identity. Almost a century later, now that Europe rubs shoulders with a new supranational awareness, such reproaches may sound like superseded folklore; yet they involve an eternal task: ‘denuo recognitum et auctum’: ‘again reconsidered and expanded’.