Martin Luther was German. So, in origin and speech, were nearly all
the people of the Netherlands; long before Luther, men in the Low
Countries had been stirred by a strong reformist ardor and had banded
together into zealous religious sects. One such influential group was the
Brothers of the Common Lite, a teaching order that helped train the
great scholarly reformer of the age, Erasmus of Rotterdam. Appalled by
mans behavior both in and out of religious orders, the Brothers instilled
a lesson that Erasmus in his own scholarly way was to preach all his life.
Its essence: a Christian must try to act like Christ. The results of man's
failure to do so were savagely portrayed in the late 1400s by the nightmarish paintings of another Netherlander, Hieronymus Bosch—who was
followed by a host of imitators including Pieter Bruegel.
