This case study discusses competing communities as transtemporal networks that may manifest in contemporary constellations but that are not sufficiently described in the vocabulary of social groups and shared values. It takes a claim from the Cluster proposal as its starting point, namely that 'communities based in mediated communication (and more specifically in writing/reading) inevitably transcend categories of the "face-to-face" and the "here and now". Stretching across space and time, communities of "letters" are always potentially global in their effects and ambitions. Put differently, the very practice of writing/reading, which allows human communications to reverberate beyond any individual speaker's life-span, affords groupings that are not bound to a particular time and place, even though they may often sustain—or challenge—the power of locally based elites or political projects' (Johnston/Traninger 2018: 31). The material on which this discussion will be based is Erasmus's of Rotterdam first venture into the world of published authors, the Adagiorum collectanea (1500).