 During his lifetime Erasmus’ name became synonymous with humanism, a label also adopted in modern reference works (such as Nauert 2006). Today the term “humanist” has a broad range of meanings. In the 16th century the word denoted a student or teacher of the studia humanitatis, a curriculum focusing on the study of classical languages, rhetoric, and literature. At northern universities, where scholasticism and the dialectical method reigned supreme, the trend-setting humanists were regarded as challengers of the status quo (see Rummel 1995). The defenders of tradition belittled their competitors as “grammarians” and dismissed the humanities as poetria, the stuff of poetry. To a certain extent, the tensions between the two schools of thought may be explained in terms of professional jealousy, but at its core was the dispute over methodology and qualifications. Humanists favored rhetorical arguments; scholastics insisted on logical proof. Scholastic theologians in particular regarded the humanists as dangerous interlopers. They questioned their orthodoxy because of their inclination to use the skeptical ars dubitandi and denied their right to apply philological principles to the biblical text. Scripture, they insisted, was the exclusive domain of graduate theologians. Humanists in turn saw the dialectical method used by the scholastics as a perversion of Aristotelian logic and derided their technical terminology as a corruption of the Latin language. In the Praise of Folly Erasmus lampooned scholastic theologians in a passage that became notorious: