The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~150,000 words · 698 passages
Cite this work
- APAErasmus. (n.d.). The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/erasmus/the-colloquies-of-erasmus-volume-i
- MLAErasmus. The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/erasmus/the-colloquies-of-erasmus-volume-i.
- ChicagoErasmus. The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/erasmus/the-colloquies-of-erasmus-volume-i.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The first volume of Erasmus's dialogues: scenes of everyday conversation written at first to teach Latin, and turned afterwards into his sharpest criticism of the manners of his time.
Context and history
They began in 1518 as a phrasebook for students and grew edition by edition into an altogether different book. The speakers are soldiers, pilgrims, monks, housewives and children, and they talk about ill-made marriages, doubtful relics, fasting, war and the trade in indulgences. The dialogue form let him say things that would have cost him more dearly in a treatise — and even so the Sorbonne condemned them and they ended on the Index. It was the most widely read of Erasmus's books for two centuries, and it is the one that explains why he was accused of laying the egg that Luther hatched, a charge he denied.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
In preparing this volume for the press, Bailey's text has been carefully revised, and clerical errors have been corrected, but the liberty has not been taken of altering his language, even to the extent of removing the coarsenesses of expression which disfigure the book and in which he exaggerates the plain speaking of the original. Literary feeling is jealous, no doubt justly, on general grounds, of expurgations. Further, throughout the greater part of the work, the translation has been closely compared with the Latin original. Occasional inaccuracies on Bailey's part have been pointed out in the Appendix of Notes at the end of the volume. The literal sense of the original, sometimes its language, has in many of these notes been given, with the view of increasing the interest of perusal to the general reader. The remainder of the notes are, like the contents of the volume, of a miscellaneous character: philological, antiquarian, historical. They do not, of course, profess to supply an exhaustive commentary; but are designed to afford elucidations and illustrations of the text that may be intelligible and instructive to the English reader, and possibly to some extent to the scholar. The Colloquies of Erasmus form a rich quarry of intellectual material, from which each student will extract that which he regards to be of peculiar value. The linguist, the antiquary, the observer of life and manners, the historian, the moralist, the theologian may all find themselves attracted to these pages. It is hoped that there are many who at the present time will welcome the republication, in English, of a book which not only produced so great a sensation in Europe on its appearance, but may be said to have had something to do with the making of history.…