Short answers, pulled from the story.
Erasmus was a Dutch humanist, Catholic theologian, and pioneering philologist and educationalist who lived from about 1466 to 1536. He was one of the most influential scholars of the Northern Renaissance and, by the 1530s, his writings accounted for 10 to 20 percent of book sales in Europe.
Erasmus was born in Rotterdam on the 27th or the 28th of October in the late 1460s, on the vigil of Simon and Jude. He died of dysentery in Basel on the 12th of July 1536 and was buried in the Basel Minster.
Erasmus produced pioneering Latin and Greek scholarly editions of the New Testament with annotations, first published in 1516, along with Paraphrases of the whole New Testament except Revelation. Up to 300,000 copies of the various editions were printed in his lifetime, forming the basis for most Textus Receptus Protestant translations from the 16th through the 19th centuries.
Erasmus wrote On Free Will, The Praise of Folly, The Complaint of Peace, the Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, and Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. His satires The Praise of Folly, Julius Excluded from Heaven, and The Complaint of Peace remain his works with enduring popularity.
Erasmus held a middle-road approach that disappointed and angered partisans in both camps. He promoted synergism, which Luther and John Calvin rejected in favour of monergism, and he remained a Catholic committed to reforming the church from within while urging peace and pastoral tolerance on matters of indifference.
Erasmus befriended Thomas More during his first visit to England in 1499 and later stayed at More's house, where he wrote The Praise of Folly. More wrote Utopia in 1516 with Erasmus's encouragement, and after More was executed by Henry VIII in 1535, Erasmus wrote the first biography of More and Bishop John Fisher.