"I wish to be called a citizen of the world," wrote Desiderius Erasmus in 1522. Every country in Western Europe tried to claim as its own Erasmus of Rotterdam, the peripatetic man of letters who shunned the public spotlight in favor of a quiet study- wherever he could find it. In 1974, the University of Toronto Press launched an effort to translate into English the complete Latin works of this prodigiously productive scholar. Nine volumes of The Collected Works of Erasmus, including...