Erasmus, “Copia” Micro Sum

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Erasmus – Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style

In Copia Erasmus has two books the first is, “Abundance of Expression” in which he states, “The speech of man is a magnificent and impressive thing when it surges along like a golden river, with thoughts and word pouring out in rich abundance. Yet the pursuit of speech like this involves considerable risk.” He states that he has, “put forward some ideas on copia, the abundant style”, and, “treating its two aspects of content and expression, and giving some examples and patterns.” (rt 597)

Full text of 'Desiderius Erasmus concerning the aim and method of education' See other formats. Especially must all Erasmus' later criticism of the monastic life be referred to one of his earliest literary performances, the treatise, On the Contempt of the World (de contemptu mundi), written, probably, while he was still at Steyn, and when he was about twenty years old. This is an essay on the charms of the monastery as compared to 'the. Created Date: 9/27/2011 10:06:54 AM. The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK/IRPA) is honoured to announce the Bruegel Success Story Colloquium in Brussels on 12-14 September 2018. The colloquium is intended for curators, art-historians, conservators and scientists studying. Often this serves as an epideictic topos, as when Erasmus hails Charles V’s brother Ferdinand as a philosopher king (in the conclusion to his treatise on the Christian concord De sarcienda ecclesiae concordia) (ASD V-3:313), or when he similarly acclaims King Sigismund of Poland in a letter to a Polish correspondent (Ep. Yet, the topic.

Under the heading of invention and practice he states that Cicero was, “the great father of all eloquence” and that copia is twofold, “richness of expression involves synonyms” and “richness of subject matter involves the assembling”. These are, “two aspects are so interconnected in reality that one cannot easily separate one from the other”. The advantages of studying this subject includes, “exercise in expressing oneself in different ways will be of considerable importance in general for the acquisition of style.” (598) In pursuit of this goal, “One should collect a vast supply of words like this from all sides out of good authors, provide oneself with varied equipment.” (599)

Erasmus De Copia Pdf 2016

He then discusses the use of different classes of words which include vulgar, unusual, poetic, archaic, obsolete harsh foreign, indecent, and new words. After which he states, “No Latin expression can approach the charm of a Greek one in which we allude to a passage of remark of some author” and that, “we are justified in mixing Greek with Latin, especially when writing for the educated public.” (604)

Erasmus goes into his famous copia example has he “take(s) this sentence: Your letter pleased me mightily” and writes it in many different ways exampled by, “As my eye fell on your letter, an incredible tide of joy swelled in my breast.” at the end of which he reminds the reader that, “this exercise is designed for the composition of verse as well.” (607-9)

From here he shifts to, “Abundance of Subject Matter” and states, “the first method on enriching what one has to say on any subject is to take something that can be expressed in brief and general terms, and expand it and separate it” (609) One can do this by, “hav(ing) the general statement at the beginning, and then take it up again in a different form of words”. (610) The second method is, “rehearse in detail everything which led up to the final result.” and he continues with, “The ninth method consists of amplification or building up” and “the opposite method to this is comparison” in which, “its effect by starting from something less striking.” (611-2) “The second method of amplification uses the rhetorical figure know as inference” and yet, “another method of build-up is the piling up of words and phrases meaning the same thing.” “The tenth method of expansion depends on inventing as many propositions as possible.” (613) “The eleventh method of enriching our style depends on the accumulation of proofs and arguments” and, “proofs fall into two classes invented or artificial proofs, and given proofs” and as for arguments they, “can be likely, possible, and not impossible.” (614-5)

He most to illustrative examples in which he says, “A most effective means of making what we are saying convincing and of generation copia at the same time is to be found in illustrative examples” (616) One should use variety, and, “derived (illustrations) not only from whole range of Greek an d Latin literature, but also from history” (616) He describes the use of, examples, judgments, maxims, elaboration, and scriptural allegories.

He concludes this book with, “No discipline is so remote from rhetoric that you cannot use it to enrich your collection” and he desires students to, “flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, will light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive.” (622-3) He give example in Socrates. He finishes with, “One can even twist material to serve the opposite purpose” for, “Only senseless rocks and the brute earth do not move.” in there thinking and rhetoric. (627)

I had heard that Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) wrote a book showing hundreds of ways to say “thanks for your letter,” so I went and looked it up, just to see what one of the Renaissance’s prime movers was thinking when he did that.

The book in question –originally published as De duplici copia verborum ac rerum Commentarii duo, and available in English in volume 24 of his Collected Works as Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (translated and annotated by Betty I. Knott)– is much more than a stunt. It’s a really helpful exercise in developing a style that is rich and full.

Generations of readers have known this: De Copia was used as a textbook for rhetoric and composition throughout northern Europe in Erasmus’ lifetime. It was popular enough to be pirated, to give rise to summaries, to be circulated in the form of excerpts, and to spawn commentaries.

In his classic opening sentence, Erasmus points to the goal of his instruction: “The speech of man is a magnificent thing when it surges along like a golden river, with thoughts and words pouring out in rich abundance.” He wants to train speakers and writers in the abundant style, so they can wield this magnificent power of spoken abundance. But he also warns, in the very next sentence, that the goal is not abundance for its own sake, and that cultivating this style has its dangers:

Yet the pursuit of speech like this involves considerable risk…. We find that a good many mortal men who make great efforts to achieve this godlike power of speech fall instead into mere glibness, which is both silly and offensive. They pile up a meaningless heap of words and expressions without any discrimination, and thus obscure the subject they are talking about, as well as belabouring the ears of their unfortunate audience.” (p. 295)

From this second sentence on, Erasmus constantly includes warnings against glibness and word-mongering. In fact, he says, the best defense against such errors is learning the art of abundance, because he who can expand can also contract. Those who learn this art have practiced contracting an idea to its briefest statement, and then expanding it to its fullest scope, “first compressing the subject to such an extent that you can subtract nothing, and then enriching and expending it so that nothing can be added.” (298)

Homer, according to Quintillian (according to Erasmus) exemplifies this mastery because he “is equally admirable for fullness and for compression.” But the Latin-loving Erasmus chooses his most apt illustrations from Virgil, who can show readers “the plains where Troy once stood” (Aen. 3.11), a handful of words in which “As Macrobius says…he has …consumed and swallowed up the city without even allowing the ruins to remain.” (Macrob. Saturnalia 5.1.8) Yet when Virgil needs to pile it on, he can provide ten lines of “Come is the final day, fate’s inevitable doom / …we see Trojans are no more…” (Aeneid 2.324ff, 241-2, 361-2, etc.)

Why will such fullness result in a self-controlled and interesting speaker or writer? “Who,” asks Erasmus, “will speak more succinctly than the man who can readily and without hesitation pick out from a huge army of words, from the whole range of figures of speech, the feature that contributes most effectively to brevity?” (300) Lack of fullness is, rather paradoxically, what leads to empty verbosity, because “we find ourselves destitute of verbal riches and hesitate, or keep singing out the same old phrase like a cuckoo, and are unable to clothe our thought in other colours or other forms… we shall bore our wretched audience to death.” (p. 302)

Abundance makes variety possible, and “variety is so powerful in every sphere that there is absolutely nothing, however brilliant, which is not dimmed if not commended by variety. Nature above all delights in variety; in all this huge concourse of things, she has left nothing anywhere unpainted by her wonderful technique of variety.” The audience is always in grave danger of boredom, but tedium “can easily be avoided by someone who has it at his fingertips to turn one idea into more shapes than Proteus himself is supposed to have turned into.” (p. 302)

De Copia is a book designed to help form the capacity for abundance. Erasmus assumes that his task as a teacher is to coax students into unfolding and elaborating on ideas, not to criticize and curtail their thoughts. In fact, he would rather see too much fullness than not enough: “I am giving instructions for the young in whom Quintillian was quite content to see an over-exuberant style, because the excessive growth can easily be cut back by criticism and the passing years will wear down other excrescences, while it is quite impossible to do anything to improve a thin and poverty-stricken style.” (p. 300) Critical cutting-back can wait; without the burst of verbal flourishing, nothing can happen.

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For this reason, de Copia itself is an exercise book, and Erasmus makes sure his readers know that he is “not prescribing how one ought to write or speak, but merely indicating what is useful for practice, and everybody knows that in practicing everything must be exaggerated.” (p. 299) In other words, don’t try this in public!

The bulk of the book is a set of categories and comments on the techniques of rhetorical expansion. But along the way Erasmus gives “some brief advice on the exercises by which this faculty may be developed.” Step one is to commit Erasmus’ categories of expansion to memory (you’ll have to go to his book to get those); step two is that “we should frequently take a group of sentences and deliberately set out to express each of them in as many versions as possible, as Quintillian advises, using the analogy of a piece of wax which can be moulded into one shape after another. This exercise will be more profitable if a group of students competes…”

This is the context in which Erasmus sets out his celebrated list of ways to say “thanks for writing.” The actual sentence he transforms, to “see how far we can go in transforming the basic expression into a Protean variety of shapes” (p. 348), is this: Your letter pleased me mightily. tuae litterae me magnopere delectarunt. Some of the variations work better in Latin, and you’ll hear various reports of how many different ways Erasmus produces here. In the Collected Works edition I consulted, the list runs from page 348 to 354, and I count about 150 variations (the edition published in 1512 printed the list with numbers, from i to cxlvi).

Here are just a few of the variations:

Your brief note refreshed my spirits in no small measure.
I was in no small measure refreshed in spirit by your grace’s hand.
From your affectionate letter I received unbelievable pleasure.
Your pages engendered in me an unfamiliar delight.
I conceived a wonderful delight from your pages.
Your lines conveyed to me the greatest joy.
The greatest joy was brought to me by your lines.
We derived great delight from your excellency’s letter.
From my dear Faustus’ letter I derived much delight.
In these Faustine letters I found a wonderful kind of delectation.
At your words a delight of no ordinary kind came over me.
I was singularly delighted by your epistle.
To be sure your letter delighted my spirits!
Your brief missive flooded me with inexpressible Joy.
As a result of your letter, I was suffused by an unfamiliar gladness.
Your communication poured vials of joy on my head.
Your epistle afforded me no small delight.
The perusal of your letter charmed my mind with singular delight.

And so on. And on and on!

Erasmus De Copia Pdf En Linea

Much of what Erasmus teaches in the Copia would need to be updated before being applied to modern education in rhetoric and composition, but he is fundamentally right about the need for speakers to find the fullness of their powers of expression. The power of speech is indeed magnificent when it rushes on like a mighty stream! Call to mind the most powerful writing you’ve read, and you’ll likely remember wondering how the author found such ways of speaking. There is a mighty mystery in the abundant style.

And Erasmus continually guards against being misunderstood by mocking the pseudo-abundant style:

Erasmus De Copia Pdf En

So if anyone sets out to acquire variety of language before equipping himself with a Latinity that is neat and clean, he will be no less ridiculous (in my opinion at any rate) than a beggar who has not got even one garment that he can decently put on, but keeps changing his clothes and coming out in public draped with different sets of rags, ostentatiously displaying not riches but penury. The more often he did it the madder he would be thought. Yet certain persons with aspirations towards the rich style act with equal absurdity; they cannot express what they have to say even once in elegant language, but apparently feeling ashamed if they fail to jabber as well as they can, they display their jabbering in one variation after another, each worse than the last, as if they had entered a competition with themselves to speak just as barbarously as it is possible to speak. … I would have all kinds of food served at a splendid banquet, but who could put up with a hundred dishes appearing on the table, every one of them nauseating? (306)