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Encyclopaedic Erasmus
Author(s) -
Cummings Brian
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/rest.12049
Subject(s) - erasmus+ , humanism , cicero , rhetoric , variety (cybernetics) , classics , encyclopedia , style (visual arts) , subject (documents) , literature , art , philosophy , history , linguistics , art history , theology , computer science , the renaissance , library science , artificial intelligence
Copiousness as an idea is centrally identified with E rasmus. De copia was a milestone in establishing E rasmus as a humanist scholar after its first publication in P aris in 1512. In turn, this book was a major influence on theories of rhetoric, and of writing in general, throughout the sixteenth century. Following on from C icero, E rasmus argues that style must be abundant in order to be effective, and that abundance consists of two primary elements: variety of expression and variety of subject matter. Copiousness is the key to writing, or to language, or even to an idea of knowledge. This article analyses the theory of copiousness in E rasmus, and then examines its practical application in the A dagia – another sixteenth‐century bestseller – which renders copiousness forth as a physical entity. That work offers the principle of an anthology of all ancient learning, and thus the summation of the bonae litterae . In the process, it provides a model for the problem of how to render the encyclopaedia in literary form.