Primary Contributors:
Primary Contributors: †Albertus J. Kölker and Robin Buning
Cornelius Crocus (c. 1500–1550)
Cornelius Crocus was born around 1500 in Amsterdam, the city in which he was to spend most of his life as a schoolmaster. Between 1517 and 1521 he studied in Leuven under Adriaan van Baarland (Barlandus) and Alardus Amstelredamus (of Amsterdam). Crocus and Alardus became close friends and joined forces to fight the Reformation in their writings. From 1521 to 1537, Crocus taught in Amsterdam, from c. 1531 onwards as rector of the Oudezijdsschool. In 1538 he returned to Leuven to study theology, but in 1544–9 he moved back to Amsterdam, where he resumed his position as rector of the Oudezijdsschool. In 1550 he left for Rome to join the Jesuit order, where he died later the same year.
Crocus wrote didactic works, theological-polemical writings, and a play. For use in schools he wrote the Farrago sordidorum verborum (on the proper use of words in Latin). It was published in 1529 by his friend Alardus, together with Desiderius Erasmus’s Paraphrasis in Elegantias Laurentii Vallae, much to the latter’s displeasure. The work was extremely popular and reprinted many times. Two of Crocus’s other didactic works dealt with Latin as a spoken language. For his pupils he wrote the sacred comedy Joseph (Antwerp: Joannes Steelsius, 1536).
His theological-polemical works defend orthodoxy against the Reformation, such as the Dissertatiuncula contra anabaptismum (1535), which explains the Catholic position on baptism, and the Ecclesia (1536), a preaching aid opposing heretical beliefs that was dedicated to the Amsterdam priest Nicolaas Cannius.
Few letters written by Crocus have survived and only two of those that he received, both from Alardus. Most of these letters were dedications to published works. Among the addressees are many people from Amsterdam, such as the priests Cannius and Martinus Nivenius, the city council, and a group of unidentified pupils of Crocus. His open letter to the Amsterdam school rector Joannes Sartorius of 1 October 1531, written at the instigation of Alardus and Nivenius, was an attack on Sartorius’s Protestant view that man is justified by faith alone. It was published, together with a prefatory letter by Alardus to Nivenius, in Cologne in 1532. Other correspondents included Erasmus and Tielmannus Clercx, the president of the Pope’s College at Leuven.
Partners and Additional Contributors
The metadata for this catalogue was collated by Robin Buning as part of the ’Sharing Knowledge in Literary and Learned Networks – The Republic of Letters as a Pan-European Knowledge Society’ [SKILLNET] project, funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement No 724972), under the direction of Dr Dirk van Miert. The catalogue is based on the inventory of Crocus’s correspondence as compiled by Albertus J. Kölker. The introductory text for this page was written by Robin Buning and draws heavily on a bio-bibliographical article on Crocus by Miekske L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk. See the bibliography below for the full bibliographic details of both publications.
Key Bibliographic Source(s)
Provenance
The inventory published by A. J. Kölker largely draws on contemporary printed sources, for the most part dedicatory and introductory letters to Crocus’s own works and to those of his teacher and friend Alardus Amstelredamus.
Further resources
Bibliography
C. G. van Leijenhorst, ‘Cornelis Croock’, in Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, eds, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, 3 vols (Toronto, 1985–1987), vol. 1, p. 362.