Erasmus' Miniatures

Letters, Adages, Colloquies and Other Short Forms

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There is hardly a sixteenth-century genre that Erasmus did not try, often ambitiously. He made big books from little things: proverbs, anecdotes, metaphors, quotations, and textual notes. The works that have withstood the tests of time are satires and edited collections: Praise of Folly, Julius exclusus, the Adagia, letters, and colloquies. There are no better introductions to Erasmus than these, and they share a common emphasis on variety. Erasmus' Miniatures examines his lifelong interest in small genres and his use of them, inserting them into larger works or gradually amassing them in books of a thousand pages. They were written to teach Latin and inculcate Christian values, and remain attractive as the most intimate expressions of his thoughts, moods, hopes, and terrors.
Copyright Year:
2026
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-71071-9
Publication:
01 Dec 2025
Hardback
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-71070-2
Publication:
04 Dec 2025
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Willis Goth Regier, Ph.D. (1978, University of Nebraska) has served as the director of the University of Nebraska Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the University of Illinois Press. He is the author of Book of the Sphinx (2004), In Praise of Flattery (2007), and Quotology (2010).
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Abbreviations

1 Introduction: Strings, Structures, and Heaps

2 Erasmus’ Encomia
 1 Erasmus’ Encomia
 2 The Panegyricus
 3 Erasmus on Flattery
 4 Panegyricus Revisited
 5 Conclusions

3 Erasmus’ Letters
 1 Publishing Letters
 2 Posthumous Printings
 3 The Legacy

4 The Colloquies
 1 Choosing Colloquies
 2 Erasmus as Educator
 3 Colloquy Clusters
 4 Uses of the Colloquies
 5 Erasmus as Storyteller
 6 All, Some, or Only One

5 Collecting Adages
 1 Length Matters
 2 Faciat licet ipse periclum
 3 Selecting Adages
 4 Uncollected Adages
 5 Conclusion

6 Adages as Insults
 1 Enemies of Belles Lettres
 2 Odi prophanum vulgus
 3 Insulting the Semidocti

7 Erasmus and Fables
 1 Erasmus’ Allusions to Aesop
 2 From Aesop to Erasmus
 3 Erasmus as Fabulist
 4 Conclusions

8 Erasmus’ Excuses

9 Conclusion
Appendix 1: Uncollected Adages from Erasmus’ Other Works
Appendix 2: Collectanea Adages Absent in the Chiliades
Appendix 3: Fables in the Adagia
Appendix 4: Fables Attributed to Erasmus in the 1514 Strasbourg Fabularum and Its Successors
Works Cited
Index
Students, teachers, and scholars of Renaissance literature and history, genre studies, and Latin. University and institutional libraries. Keywords: Renaissance, Reformation, satire, apophthegms, sententiae, sayings, encomia, collections, epitomes, anthologies, insults, education, Martin Luther, Froben, Aldine, Aldus, J.-C. Margolin.
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