Competing Communities, Renaissance Style

One of Renaissance Europe’s most celebrated books, Erasmus’s of Rotterdam Adagia, opens with a proverb about friendship: ‘Amicorum omnia communia’—‘Friends hold all things in common’. In her now classical study, Kathy Eden took this adage as a starting point for a far-reaching interpretation of the humanist culture of friendship. With this first entry, Kathy Eden suggests, ‘the Adages invites its readers to join a community where all things are held in common (commune) including material property and, more to the point, what we would call intellectual property’ (Full reference in Zotero Library; see also Full reference in Zotero Library). In order to award programmatic status to such a far-reaching notion of friendship that entwined community and commonality, Erasmus pointedly shifted this adage from somewhere in the middle in the first version of the book, the Adagiorum collectanea (1500), to the prominent opening slot in the definitive version, the Adagiorum chiliades, which he produced with Aldo Manuzio in Venice in 1508. It is a programme of community that informs both the notion of the adage and Renaissance humanism tout court, but, as I will show in what follows, it is more aptly described as a temporal community—and a competing one at that.

Communicative devices of community building I: the rhetoric of friendship

The humanist rhetoric of friendship was not just a mode of expressing personal proximity. It facilitated entry into international intellectual and patronage networks—into a republic of letters understood as a sodalitas ‘in which everyone loves and admires each other’ Full reference in Zotero Library. It supplied a mode of discourse through which not only other scholars but also prospective patrons could be addressed as equals in the mode of as-if. Erasmus’s correspondence is obviously rich in relevant examples. To quote just one: Erasmus’s first letter to Piotr Tomicki, the secretary in the chancery of the Polish king, in December 1527, is rather short and does not offer anything beyond the assurance of respect, admiration, but also affection for the addressee whom he had never met Full reference in Zotero Library.¹I quote the letters of Erasmus and his correspondents according to the edition Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami with reference to the letter number and, where relevant, the line number. It was promptly answered in February 1528 and sent alongside 60 Hungarian ducats (ep. 1953). In turn, Erasmus dedicated his second edition of Seneca to Tomicki (ep. 2091). The transactional character of the exchange should not obscure the fact that it is the coded rhetoric of proximity that established contact in the first place and allowed the complex ritual between strangers, initiated in a language of friendship and reliably locked into the hierarchical relationship of patronage, to succeed.

Title	Fig 1 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Collectanea adagiorum, Paris: Johann Philippi, 1500, title page.
Description	Title page of the Collectanea adagorium by Erasmus of Rotterdam (Paris 1500). Source: Ghent University Library, BHSL.RES.1298. (Public Domain)
Caption	Erasmus of Rotterdam, Collectanea adagiorum, Paris: Johann Philippi, 1500, title page.

When Erasmus of Rotterdam first turned to his project of collecting proverbs, it was a different kind of community that supported his efforts. In July 1500, Erasmus, having just taken up life outside his monastic community, managed to have the German printer Johann Philipp or Philippi de Cruzenach (Kreuznach) publish his Collectanea adagiorum in Paris. The slim volume, just seventy-six leaves strong and comprising 823 entries, was Erasmus’s first book publication (see Full reference in Zotero Library). He was not yet Erasmus, and the publication needed, at least according to the printer, a fair amount of promotion. It was the printer who prefixed the volume with a title page that promised a collection of time-honoured and significant proverbs, of phrases, that is, which would lend instantaneous charm and distinction to every written or oral utterance. Young men are identified as the target audience; they would certainly want to include such gems in their letters as well as in their everyday conversations. And it was just for a small fee (‘tantillo nummulo’) that the treasure box which contained all these jewels would change hands.

Erasmus was more than aware that the Collectanea marked his first appearance on the stage of the respublica litteraria. It was not only his first independent publication; the genre itself was unknown north of the Alps. Erasmus strove hard to make the work resonate by announcing it in a series of letters to his English correspondents, but not least by having his close friend Fausto Andrelini (see on the ‘summa familiaritas’ ep. 95: 21) write a letter of praise (ep. 127), which was printed in the editio princeps on the back of the title page even before the dedicatory letter to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy (ep. 126).

Fausto Andrelini, a native of Forlì in Northern Italy and resident in Paris since 1489, had been named poeta regius by Charles VIII in 1496. He had already, well before the publication of the Collectanea, sent a letter to Willem Hermans in Steyn in 1498, probably also at Erasmus’s instigation. It served no other purpose than to attest, apparently without cause, to the high esteem in which Erasmus was held in Paris (ep. 84: introduction; see also Full reference in Zotero Library). After the Collectanea had been published in the summer of 1500, Erasmus turned to Andrelini yet again in November of that year to ask for a recommendation of the book (ep. 134). Erasmus was clearly concerned to ensure the success of the project, and Andrelini was again prepared to put his reputation on the line in support of his friend.

Communicative devices of community building II: the practice of friendship

In order to be able to adopt a rhetoric of friendship towards patrons, Erasmus relied on a practice of friendship for laying the foundations of his fame as a humanist. He depended on Andrelini, who took action on Erasmus’s behalf, but also on Augustine Caminade from Cologne, who acted as the corrector of the book and whose work was later met with Erasmus’s scorn. It was a complicated relationship, marked by disappointments and reproaches, but this did not prevent Caminade from repeatedly letting Erasmus stay with him in Paris—as he probably did also at the time of the printing of the Collectanea. What is more, Caminade, who earned an income from giving public readings of newly published books, also promoted the Collectanea in this way. The two eventually fell out in 1502 over copies of this very book, which Erasmus had promised Augustine in return for his efforts, but apparently never handed over (Full reference in Zotero Library; see ep. 128-129; and Full reference in Zotero Library). The book is thus the material manifestation, the product and touchstone of the pitfalls of a practice of friendship that linked Erasmus and other ambitious but penniless humanists in Paris around 1500. This practice was characterised by sincere affection, mutual support, shameless exploitation, and economic dependencies in equal measure.

Quite fittingly, Erasmus retrospectively described the Collectanea as a pledge of friendship in 1523—yet not in recognition of the collective effort of the Parisian circle that helped ignite his career, but as a gesture towards a patron: it had been ‘his Mountjoy’ (William Blount, Lord Mountjoy) to whom Erasmus had wanted to send a token of unchanging friendship—in the form of a publication. Since nothing had been at hand, Erasmus claims to have composed a ‘sylva adagiorum’ (‘a miscellany of adages’) on the basis of few days’ reading and sent it on as proof that the friendship had not cooled off Full reference in Zotero Library.²See on the other hand ep. 126: 241, where Erasmus speaks of two months during which he dictated the Collectanea, despite illness. On the ‘virtual realities’ in Erasmus’s autobiographical writings, see Full reference in Zotero Library. The Collectanea’s letter dedicatory is indeed a dedication, yet not just of the book, but of Erasmus the man himself to the powerful patron, who is nevertheless addressed as a friend in the most intimate terms.

This unequal community, made up of rhetorical and practical friends on what would today be called local and global levels, was united by a shared idiom, a common language that connected them as a discourse community. This language was a powerful temporal artefact, scraped from the classical tradition. The collection of adages was a powerful node that came to life through a communal effort, was used to build a community of ‘friends’, and supplied the idiom that would separate this hybrid community from competing outfits.

Creating a language in the face of a competing community

The place for this common language was the humanist letter Full reference in Zotero Library, a vehicle of distance communication not least meant to supplant the oral world of the scholastic university. Erasmus did indeed choose the letter as the preferred medium for his intellectual activity, but the letter also played an essential role in his circle of friends around 1500 when there was no physical distance to be overcome. With Fausto Andrelini, the tireless supporter of the publicity campaign for the Collectanea, Erasmus exchanged several short letters (ep. 96–100), which are not dated, but which were probably written around 1499. They thus fall precisely into the preparatory period of the Collectanea. Allen characterised them as witty notes intended to distract from the tiring lecture of a scholastic (ep. 96–100: introduction). Thus, apparently, no messenger mediated between the correspondents; rather, the notes wandered from hand to hand, as a pastime certainly, but even more as a pledge of a conspiratorial friendship.

On the back benches and bored by the magisterial lectio, the two lackadaisical students distracted themselves with witticisms. Erasmus jokingly chastises Fausto’s cryptic, allusive sentences, calling him, quite unclassically, an ‘aenigmatista’ (ep. 97). It seems that the busy exchange of notes aroused the lecturer’s ire. Erasmus warns Fausto not to continue ‘stirring up the hornet’s nest’, thus casually incorporating a proverb which was actually taken from Plautus’s Amphitryo, apparently to placate the incendiary Fausto (‘irritare cabrones’ / ‘stirring up the hornet’s nest’ appears as no. 54 in the Full reference in Zotero Library). Fausto theatrically brushed off the reprimand: everyone knows that he is ready to die for his Erasmus, he wrote, casually alluding to another adage (‘Elephantum ex musca facis’ / ‘You make an elephant out of a fly’, no. 327 in the Full reference in Zotero Library.

The fact that Erasmus wanted these effusive letters to be preserved has been explained with a reference to the fact that they are supposedly prime examples of a laconic epistolary style (ep. 96–100: introduction). But what is even more important here than the form of the letters is the way in which Erasmus and Fausto intersperse them with adages, thus demonstrating their use and functions in praxi. What is more: these eccentric little letters, exhibiting a kind of highly coded language, appear to foreshadow what Erasmus would much later call the conspiracy for the restitution of bonae litterae (‘ad restituendas optimas literas inter sese conspirare’, ep. 541: 47–48; 26 February 1517; cf. Full reference in Zotero Library; Full reference in Zotero Library). The enigmatic saying stand for a parallel, written discourse that unfolded in marked contrast to the oral scholastic context.

The adages afforded the building of a new community that could conceive of itself as the select few, a community that drew on the transtemporal nexus of a Latinity that, at that time, became the exclusive language of a temporal community in the making. Despite being available only through textual transmission, proverbs suggested the spoken idiom of the ancients. What is more: these written monuments of classical oral discourse could be pitted against the pragmatic, post-classical every-day use of Latin practised in the learned world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Around 1500, the purpose of compiling proverbs was to obtain building blocks for a familiar, intimate, idiomatic written Latinity that, in the mode of as-if, spun a thread of conversation between the ancients and their humanist admirers—a temporal community. Proverbs conveyed the flair of the spoken word, but were actually, in the early modern period, the product of wide-ranging readings as well as commonplacing with the aim of generating text. Collecting proverbs was about forging a language that would underwrite a community that competed with contemporary antagonists, in particular the scholastics.

But it was an idiom in the making: what Erasmus assembled in the Adages was far from the status of proverbiality in a good many cases. The opening of the first instalment of the Adages, the Adagiorum collectanea, is a case in point.

Demarcating communities: the obscurity of proverbs

Given the title page’s high-flying promises (see above), the first entry of the Collectanea would without doubt be an amply documented proverb, combined with a perceptive and knowledgeable commentary. So how does the Collectanea open? With—salad. The first entry reads, ‘Similes habent labra lactucas’, literally, ‘The lips find lettuce that is similar to them’, or, to give it a sententious feel, ‘Like lips, like lettuce’. The only adagium set entirely in capitals, it is more eye-catching than the title of the work itself—‘Desyderii Herasmi collectanea adagiorum ueterum’, which takes the place of a header above the column.

Title	Fig 2 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Collectanea adagiorum, Paris: Johann Philippi, 1500, fol. air.
Description	Page of the Collectanea adagiorum by Erasmus of Rotterdam (Paris 1500). Source: Ghent University Library, BHSL.RES.1298. (Public Domain)
Caption	Erasmus of Rotterdam, Collectanea adagiorum, Paris: Johann Philippi, 1500, fol. air.

Yet ‘Similes habent labras lactucas’ was not a widely known proverb at all at the time (and it demonstrably failed to become one following the publication, see Full reference in Zotero Library). Preceding Erasmus’s book, it is extant only in a singular source, and not even in a text from classical antiquity, but in Saint Jerome’s letters. Erasmus does not provide the reference. Yet paradoxically, the original location is even more of a key to its meaning than the wording itself. While it is in the nature of proverbs that they become detached from their original context to circulate freely as a shared idiom, it is obvious that Erasmus was interested in the saying’s backstory. It is taken from a letter that Jerome addressed to three friends in Aquileia, writing from the wasteland at the border ‘between the Syrians and the Saracens’. In the barbaric foreign land, he laments that the friends’ letters are few and far between, and literally embraces the one letter he has received, even talking to it. Why? The letter alone understands the Latin language (‘Nunc cum uestris litteris fabulor, illas amplexor, illae mecum loquuntur, illae hic tantum Latine sciunt’. Full reference in Zotero Library), and it represents the bond with those in the Latinate cosmos whose company he sorely missed where he was, among barbarians. Andrew Cain has shown that these letters were aesthetically calculated reflections on distance communication (Full reference in Zotero Library). Jerome’s letter thus keys in with some of Erasmus’s key concerns: reaching the many and not just the few; establishing and cultivating a Latinate world that provides a spiritual home for those stranded in inhospitable circumstances—be they literal deserts or the supposed barren lands of medieval learning.

With the singular and, what is more, unquoted source for the opening adagium, Erasmus not only presents himself as a guide who leads the way to the sources, but also insinuates a familiarity with the culture of antiquity that goes beyond having read specific texts or passages. Reclaiming ‘Labras…’ as a proverb despite the lack of textual evidence meant to claim an intimate connoisseurship of classical and post-classical linguistic usage, a connoisseurship that eludes being measured in citations alone. Erasmus’s claim to currency signals membership of a discourse community and thus at the same time a claim to authority vis-à-vis a readership that had to be won over in the first place. It also signals that this discourse community was a temporal community, one forging its own temporality involving dead and living members, stretching from ancient times to the dawn of the sixteenth century, letting dead and living members partake in a mode of speech that set the humanists apart from their scholastic contemporaries.

The rhetoric of community is inscribed in the very concept of the proverbium. Polidoro Vergilio, a competitor of Erasmus, who published his Proverbia in Italy two years before Erasmus brought out his collection, described ‘proverbia’ as ‘communia omnium uerba’ (‘words that all hold in common’, Full reference in Zotero Library: fol [a iii]^r; cf. Full reference in Zotero Library). But this supposed common treasure of the proverbia around 1500 is deceptive: Latin proverbs did not circulate liberally between contemporaries, but rather required extrapolation from the stock of a written tradition that was in the course of being painstakingly recovered. Only due to the tireless work of scholars who recovered, restored and excerpted ancient texts could proverbs be woven into written formats imagined as a ‘conversation’, such as the letter or the dialogue. The collectors themselves were, as the example of Erasmus and Polidoro Vergilio shows, competing in an increasingly crowded book market, thus evidencing the Cluster’s description of temporal communities as ‘sites of multiple forms of competition’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

Conclusion

Temporal communities are indeed not adequately described by mapping out the personal relations of contemporary human agents. They also encompass ‘more than the mere production and reception of texts that are deemed sufficiently valuable to be called “literary”; [they include] all acts and actors involved in creating and performing conflicting communities of literary sense-making, among them trans-personal and non-human agents such as genres, libraries, media or political projects’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Temporal communities involve human actors, both living and dead: while the scene of up-and-coming humanists in Paris around 1500 may well be described as a community in the traditional paradigm of Gemeinschaft v. Gesellschaft, their temporal community includes and depends on what they imagined as their ancient interlocutors. This temporal community equally emerges by way of a shared idiom (classical Latin), generic patterns (collections of proverbs), exclusive codes (puzzling adages), economic conditions (book market), power relations (patronage), preferred media (letters) and technologies (print), but above all, competing communities (scholastics) against which an identity can take shape.