COLLATING ERASMUS WITH BAPTISTA MANTUANUS
ERASMUS, Desiderius.
Collectanea adagiorum.
[(Colophon:) Strasbourg, Matthias Schürer, 1519.]
4to in 8s, ff. [4], LI, LIV–LVII, [7], [1, blank]; ff. LII and LIII supplied in facsimile; title printed in red and black within a woodcut border; some unobtrusive wormholes, slight thumbing to a few leaves, occasional light spots or stains,, else a good copy; bound in modern red roan, front board lettered in gilt, turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt; light rubbing at extremities; intensely annotated throughout, first and to a much lesser extent by a contemporary hand in red ink, which also underlines portions of the text and adds paragraph markers in places, then, very copiously, by a slightly hand in brown ink; modern date of printing to the title-page in dark blue ink.
Intensely annotated copy of a lifetime edition of Erasmus’ repository of Greek and Latin proverbs. The first version of the Adagia, containing about eight hundred maxims, had been published in 1500. Erasmus continued to add to his thesaurus for over thirty years, the success of this enterprise evident from the proliferation of editions, abridgements and translations.
‘The aim of the Adages was to recapture, in this handy portmanteau form, the outlook and way of life of the classical world through its customs, legends, and social institutions, and to put within reach of a modern public the accumulated wisdom of the past’ (Mynors, 1982).
The extensive annotations in this copy afford us an insight into some specific sixteenth-century readers’ minds, modi operandi, and concerns. The underlining and notes often refer to the portions of text printed in Greek, pointing to academic readers. A consistent and clear preference is then afforded to Latin classics such as Terence, Juvenal, Martial, Plautus, and Horace. Observations regarding style, or transcriptions of elegant turns of phrase are notably absent.
More singularly, many annotations in the more prolific hand in brown ink point to a systematic reading of the Adagia in parallel with Baptista Mantuanus’s Eclogues. The reader either had Mantuanus’s text to hand whilst annotating Erasmus, or was writing from memory. In 1496, in a letter to Henry of Bergen, Erasmus had summed up his appreciation of Mantuanus (Baptista Spagnuoli, a Carmelite who, in 1513, would become General of the Order) as a ‘Christian Virgil’, both endorsing and boosting the popularity which Mantuanus’s writings, quickly adopted as standard texts in humanist schools, enjoyed in Renaissance Europe. While the lasting presence of the ‘good old Mantuan’ (Shakespeare, Love’s labour’s lost) in European Renaissance literature is fully acknowledged, an analysis of the uses of the text by Renaissance readers as evidenced in this volume may further Renaissance scholars’ understanding of its specific influence.
Matthias Schürer began printing the Adagia in this form in 1509, producing numerous editions which are seemingly reprints in the following decade. A handful of copies of these editions are held in US and UK institutions, however this 1519 edition appears to be recorded only at the British Library (UK) and Folger Shakespeare Library (US) besides copies in Continental Europe.
VD 16 E 1921. See Rummel, ‘The Reception of Erasmus’ Adages in Sixteenth-Century England’ in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, vol. 18, no. 2 (1994), pp. 19–30.