What is Ad Fontes?
The Latin phrase, Ad Fontes was brought into common parlance by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. While the phrase had long before appeared in the Latin Vulgate’s translation of Psalm 42 it was Erasmus who first applied it to the study of the humanities and in particular to the study of classical languages. Ad Fontes was and still is the battle cry against ignorance and indifference. It was this phrase that fueled the passions and creativity of the Renaissance. Although Erasmus was a Catholic scholar his ‘Ad Fontes’ movement was so universal in appeal it was also adopted by many of the Protestants Reformers and became their battle cry as well. The original model for Liberal Arts education and Classical education of the Western world owes so much to Erasmus as well as to the many other great Christian pioneers of the Renaissance who embraced Ad Fontes.
The Ad Fontes site is authored primarily by me a friendly layman with a somewhat antiquarian (maybe esoteric) interest in Biblical philology, exegesis, hermeneutics, literature analysis, linguistic, language acquisition, and cross-cultural communication. This blog has a dedicated focus on the aforementioned subjects as well as some of the, in my opinion, cooler tools of the trade.
I also have a great interest in Japanology or Japanese studies but I probably won’t be writing about that on this blog very much.