This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Adagia is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
Adagia (adagium is the singular form and adagia is the plural) is an annotated collection of Greek and Latin adages, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. According to Speroni (1964, p. 1), Adagia is one of "the most monumental collections of [...] adagia ever assembled".
The collection is the fruit of Erasmus' vast reading in Classical literature; he expanded it occasionally throughout his career, and the book did not attain its final form until close to his death.
The first edition, titled Collecteana Adagiorum was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred proverbs. By the end of his time in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection to over three thousand items, many accompanied by explanatory notes that are often, in fact, brief essays on political and moral topics. He had also changed the title to Adagiorum Chiliades (the thousand proverbs). This was the title it retained in all subsequent editions.
By his death, Erasmus had compiled 4,658 adages in his collection. Many have become commonplace in our everyday language, and we owe our use of them to Erasmus. Among these are:
|
|
Context
The work reflects a typical Renaissance attitude toward Classical texts: to wit, that they were fit for appropriation and amplification, as expressions of a timeless wisdom first uncovered by the classical authors. It is, as well, an expression of the new humanist emphasis in education. The Adagia could only have been possible in the new world of European education, in which careful attention to a broader range of classical texts produced a much fuller picture of the literature of antiquity than had been possible, or desired, in the medieval period. In a period in which sententiæ were often marked by special fonts and footnotes in printed texts, and in which the ability to use classical wisdom to bolster modern arguments was a critical part of scholarly and even political discourse, it is not surprising that Erasmus' collection was among the most popular volumes of the century.
Source: Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume 33, University of Toronto Press, 1991
References
- Thomas Greene. (1982). The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
- G.K. Hunter. (1951). "The Marking of Sententiæ in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances." The Library 5th series 6. 171-188.
- James McConica. (1991). Past Masters: Erasmus. Oxford University Press.
- Speroni, C. (1964). Wit and wisdom of the Italian Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
External links
- List of the proverbs from the 1700 Leiden edition, Leiden University.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 1 January 2009, at 22:34.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Adagia".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.