The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~150,000 words · 698 passages
Cite this work
- APAErasmus. (n.d.). The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/erasmus/the-colloquies-of-erasmus-volume-i
- MLAErasmus. "The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/erasmus/the-colloquies-of-erasmus-volume-i.
- ChicagoErasmus. The Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I.. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/erasmus/the-colloquies-of-erasmus-volume-i.
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.
_The Franciscans,_ [Greek: Ptôchoplousioi], _or Rich Beggars_ _The Abbot and Learned Woman_ _The Epithalamium of Petrus Ægidius_ _The Exorcism or Apparition_ _The Alchymist_ _The Horse-Cheat_ _The Beggars' Dialogue_ _The Fabulous Feast_ _The Lying-in Woman_ Prefatory Note. The present English version of Erasmus' _Colloquies_ is a reprint of the translation of N. Bailey, the compiler of a well-known Dictionary. In his Preface Bailey says, "I have labour'd to give such a Translation as might in the general, be capable of being compar'd with the Original, endeavouring to avoid running into a paraphrase: but keeping as close to the original as I could, without Latinizing and deviating from the English Idiom, and so depriving the English reader of that pleasure that Erasmus so plentifully entertains his reader with in Latin." This is a modest and fair account of Bailey's work. The chief peculiarity of his version is its reproduction of the idiomatic and proverbial Latinisms, and generally of the classical phrases and allusions in which Erasmus abounds, i