P. S. (Percy Stafford) Allen

Born in 1869, Percy Stafford Allen was educated at Clifton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and went on to become one of Britain’s best-known scholars of Desiderius Erasmus. He later served as President of Corpus Christi College, and his reputation rested above all on his major editorial work on Erasmus’s letters.

Allen’s scholarship helped make Renaissance humanism more accessible to later readers. Alongside his large editorial projects, he also wrote books such as The Age of Erasmus, bringing together careful research and a readable style that opened up the world of European learning in the 15th and 16th centuries.

He died in 1933, but his work remained important to historians, classicists, and readers interested in Erasmus and the intellectual life of Renaissance Europe. He is still remembered as a patient, exacting scholar whose work gave lasting shape to the study of one of Europe’s great humanists.