The University Hall! This is where students come to register for their first year of university.
Erasmus himself must have come here five hundred years ago
to register as a theology student.
He was a good friend of Adrian of Utrecht, the later pope,
and due to this friendship, Erasmus was offered a professorship at the university during his first stay in Leuven.
But he declined.
Erasmus was a humanist through and through
and much preferred to spend his time travelling and writing.
The dictum "The whole world is my fatherland",
from his work "Adagia" was certainly applicable to him;
He was never tied down to a particular place.
Look here, this memorial commemorates the seventy months that Erasmus spent here in Leuven
and the impact he had on the university.
The European exchange programme in which students spend
part of their programme studying at a university abroad
is named after – you guessed it – Erasmus.
During his second period in Leuven from 1517 to 1521,
Erasmus founded the Collegium Trilingue and studied theology here.
Erasmus was not only extremely erudite,
he of course also wrote a number of important works.
"In Praise of Folly" is probably his most famous;
it's a critical indictment of the corruption and abuses in his time.
But he also wrote "the Adagia", a collection of proverbs, editions of the Greek texts of the New Testament
and other works. All of these books also needed to be printed.
Directly across the street from this building stood the printing house of Dirk Martens,
who was also a humanist and one of Erasmus' best friends.
Martens printed numerous works by
famous writers like Erasmus and Thomas More, but he also printed course books
for students at the university and the Collegium Trilingue.