Just came across this piece this morning, which is behind a paywall if you're not at a University that subscribes to the journal Renaissance Studies, but the gist of it is that "Erasmian humanism" is a certain pioneering model of how the intellectual can operate in public life, the sphere of "neg-otium" (unquiet, contestation, busy-ness, business).  In this way Erasmus and his followers pioneered the role of the "public intellectual," one whose "new form of non‐institutional authority" gave them a kind of voice in public affairs--matters of the church and court (legal and princely) as well as the learned world (not yet the "scholarly" world because much of the world of universities was not properly learned, and much of the learned world was not strictly speaking located in university institutions).

Now, the article itself doesn't work very hard to convince me that it's not simply restating, in a slightly different idiom, what Lisa Jardine argued years ago in her book Erasmus, Man of Letters. In fact, Jardine's book gets a shout-out that this paper is taking its argument "further" (and a later footnote reference).  I'm not sure I didn't see a lot of the "further" in Jardine's book, however.  Also Connie Furey's book Erasmus, Contarini, and the Republic of Letters seems very on-target here, but also doesn't get much direct attention either, though she points out the specifically religious shape of the public sphere so constructed (in a way against thinkers like Habermas, who argue for the emergence of publicity two centuries later).  (I may be biased, because Prof. Furey is a long-standing friend, and I think this book has been woefully under-appreciated by scholars beyond its specialized audience.)  Besides these, Mark Vessey's several essays on Latin Christian Writers in Late Antiquity make the case for an embryonic effort, though not self-consciously undertaken, for a similar project in late antiquity, centered around Jerome--Vessey's stuff is always thought-provoking.

But the piece seems very much worth your reading, if you can get it, because it does map the ways in which these learned people tried to make their learning apply to the "wider world" that surrounded them, buffeted them, sustained them (financially and institutionally) and in other ways oppressed them (financially, ideologically, politically, religiously).  These figures tried to get a hearing for the work they did, and to transmute, via some kind of rhetorical alchemy, the reputation they had as learned men--not good men--into authority for causes of reform in church, state, or university/school (to speak very quickly there of the three kinds of institutions they sought most directly to reform).  

Erasmus somewhat inadvertently began this process, the article argues, by opening up "reputation" to different, um, inputs:

In his most in‐depth discussion of ethos and authority in Book One of Ecclesiastes, Erasmus claimed that an audience was won over through love and authority and that authority referred to ‘that which is won by virtue’. Erasmus continued, however, by claiming that if one could draw love and authority from some other source, one should do so for the sake of piety. Indeed, many won authority through ‘the dignity of their countenance, distinguished family, holy dress, title, age, or something else like that’. This should be encouraged, since the orator is ‘compelled to become all things to all people on account of human weakness’, and he/she should ‘use this emotion of the simple as a bait to lure the souls of the inexperienced until they advance to something better’. While this kind of authority could naturally be brought to the mind of the audience in speech or writing, it was essentially tied to one’s general reputation.

In sum, for Erasmus, "while the sources of social authority, because of their merely instrumental nature in enhancing good, were conceptually subordinate to true authority stemming from self‐transformation, the importance of both to a successful life of negotium in the service of the community was acknowledged within Erasmus’ rhetorical theory." 

The point of all this is at the end of the piece, in the last paragraph:

despite the failure to exert decisive influence in political and religious affairs, the Erasmian moment must be considered significant in the broader history of the Republic of Letters. This is not because it anticipated a distinctively modern public sphere of free discussion in a Habermassian sense. Despite its avowed ideals, the Republic was an exclusive and often hierarchical structure wherein critical attitudes could be punished. But while internal critique was not necessarily encouraged, the Republic was linked to the possibilities of externalizing one’s opinions since its reciprocal relations could be conceptualized as a source of authority necessary to promote reform. In connecting typical Quattrocento humanist literary devices for creating reputation (laudation, epistolary exchange, mastering of biographies) with the communicative possibilities offered by the printing press, the Republic of Letters gained unprecedented visibility, reputation and authority. Ultimately, Erasmian humanists grasped the emergence of a new form of non‐institutional authority, but simultaneously experienced its limits.

Well, I'd say they sort of experienced the limits, in the sense that they couldn't immediately get other people to do what they say.  Then again I can't do that with my students.  In fact I can't do that with my children.  In deeper fact, I can't even do that with myself.  (Augustine, who stands at one of the wellsprings of this whole discussion, kind of pointed that out to us a while ago.)  But beyond their "experiencing the limits" of this authority, what else they did was maybe more important: they began explicitly to separate expertise from virtue.

While the author avers that "the focus on the Republic of Letters as a source of reputation rather than virtue should not be interpreted as a one‐dimensional project to maximize social status," we can accept that warning and yet still say that, even if it was not about "maximizing social status," the "focus" on reputation (I'd say not a focus but an incipient and incrimental shifting of attention to it) was a decisive moment of "de-charisma-ifying" the written or spoken interventions of a figure--disassociating their insights on things "outside" of themselves (texts, history, natural science, what have you) with their command and right orientation of the "insides" of themselves (i.e., their character).  This seems important to me: the appeal of the voice of these figures was not, as in medieval hagiographies, anchored any special virtue or rectitude they had; it was anchored rather simply in their smarts.  

Is this the first, or one of the first, signs of the differentiation of functions that is at the heart of Weber's "rationalization" theories and all that has flowed from it?  Did the Republic of Letters' representatives' attempt to create public intellectuals encourage the long-term secularization of society?  

Not to connect this too visibly to our world, but it will always be impossible entirely to sever the dancer from the dance, the performer from the song, the author from the text.  Our age's deepening attention to the violent forms of abuse, especially (but not only) sexual violence, among public figures--not just titans of industry or celebrities but intellectuals as well--is a sign that we still struggle with the right degree of affiliation between words and person.  Erasmus's work, and the work of his followers, is an important moment in the development of that question.

The era of the Renaissance and Reformation is a fascinating one, for an almost infinite number of reasons.  (And that we have two words, and two bodies of scholarship, for almost exactly the same time span is very interesting, and warrants reflection for itself--but that's for another time.)  Figures like Erasmus and others remain very important today.  In themselves they're fascinating.  What they changed for their future, and our present, is worth considering as well.