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This article examines Desiderius Erasmus’ (ca. 1466–1536) translation of 1Cor 14:34–35, with a particular focus on his rendering of the Greek verb σιγάτωσαν in verse 34. Erasmus translated this verb as sileant rather than taceant, thereby diverging from the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate as well as from his own general preference for concordance. Nowhere else in his Novum Testamentum did Erasmus translate σιγᾶν as silere. Instead, he consistently used tacere or its derivative conticere, including in 1Cor 14:28 and 14:30, where he translated σιγάτω as taceat. These verses, however, belonged to the same context as 1Cor 14:34 and in all three of them σιγᾶν was conjugated in the same mood (imperative), tense (present) and voice (active). Given this coherence, the question arises as to why Erasmus uniquely rendered the Greek verb in verse 34 as silere, particularly since this choice influenced the interpretation of the verse. Through Paul, Erasmus now asked the women of Corinth for a different form of silence (sileant) than the one he demanded of the glossolalists in verse 28 (taceant) and the prophets in verse 30 (taceant). Through a contextual analysis of tacere and silere in Erasmus’ Novum Testamentum and a close reading of his Paraphrases, this article argues that Erasmus’ choice of silere in 1Cor 14:34 was both intentional and significant. It was intentional because Erasmus did not use silere and tacere synonymously but rather to convey distinct forms of silence. It was significant because this choice advanced a particular reading of the command to be silent – one that excluded women from participation in public life.

In this elegantly written study, Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary. In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers. Revelatory and persuasive, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern English literature as well as those interested in proverbs and the Canterbury Tales .

Many of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s works were translated into English during the reign of Henry VIII. In the process of translation, the original intention of these texts was often subverted, as Erasmus’s reputation was appropriated by his translators and their patrons to serve a variety of political and religious agendas. The present article is devoted to the translating history of one of Erasmus’s works, Sileni Alcibiadis , a proverb that was detached from the huge paremiographic repository known as Adagia and published as an autonomous work in London in the early 1540s. By highlighting corrections, retouchings and omissions, the article aims at pointing out the ways in which the anonymous translator adapted Erasmus’s text to a different cultural and pedagogic context. The final purpose of this work is to show the way in which Erasmus’s political thought ‘migrates’, with partial manipulations, into the turbulent context of mid-sixteenth-century England.

This text aims to investigate the characterization of state (respublica) in Erasmus of Rotterdam. For that, we consider the critical Latin version text of the Querela Pacis declamation and the mirror of the prince Institutio Principis Christiani. Our scope is to examine the established criteria for the state definition, its relations with the individual, as well as the legitimization of the ruler (princeps) through consensus. Erasmus’s reading allows him to understand the state as a sovereign human community capable of relating to its peers. To understand the proposed concept, we will take into account the consideration of references to respublica and consensus and others with a similar sense in the primary sources, presupposing the discussions about the just war and the convenience of peace, for the states themselves and for the citizens, in which the philosophical-juridical concept of State is inserted. It is important to emphasize that research requires the consideration of nature (rerum natura), in general, and of human nature, in particular, as well as the meaning of some concepts relevant to Political Philosophy, such as law of nations (ius gentium), of nationality, of the right of people to self-determination and, finally, of the legitimacy of the ruler in the light of the common good and the consensus of the subjects. These questions are principles present in Erasmus’s account of respublica, relevant to academic research within the framework of Political Philosophy.

Goodrich reconsiders indirect translations of ancient Greek texts made by Queen Elizabeth and Jane Lumley, Tudor noblewomen who received cutting-edge humanist educations during the middle of the sixteenth century. Both produced English translations of works that might appear to confirm their extraordinary learning: Lumley translated Euripides's play Iphigenia at Aulis, and Elizabeth translated Plutarch's \"De curiositate\". However, scholars have shown that these women worked from intermediary Latin translations made by Erasmus. The critical reaction to these revelations has ranged from disappointment at Lumley's limited Greek to outright disdain at Elizabeth's ostensible attempt to deceive contemporaries. Arguing that translation involves the remediation of a text's cultural, formal, linguistic, and material elements, this essay identifies Erasmus, Elizabeth, and Lumley as participants in a humanist tradition of remediating classical texts. This case study demonstrates the previously overlooked cultural value of indirect translation within sixteenth-century England and provides a theoretical framework for redressing the modern critical bias toward direct translation.

This article argues that Erasmus's rhetoric and Sidney's poetics converge in this respect: both emphasize interactive dynamics as key to the energeia of their texts--the ability of words to convert and change how people think and feel. This attribution of energeia's transformative effects to its communicative power is evident in their interest in personification (incorporating both voice and anthropomorphism). This comparison sets the stage for a reconsideration of George Herbert's \"The H. Communion,\" and the conclusion that discussions of the material and spiritual power of texts should be supplemented with attention to their interactive dynamics. The presencing power of the lyric, I conclude, inhered in its capacity to involve the reader in a transformative relationship.

This article reveals the complex dimensions which make it impossible to speak singularly of ‘the Reformation’. Martin Luther's reforming activity gave rise to conflicting visions of the Church, which are impossible now to resolve. The article traces the trajectory of the English Reformation through the figures of Thomas More and William Tyndale. Although both convinced of the need for reform, More was opposed to Tyndale's approach, which he perceived would lead to the breakdown of order into anarchy. The outworking of this signals the end of Christendom, and has led to continuing mutual incompatibility.

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

Christ's brides were hell bound by the end of the Middle Ages, when women—in the figure of the witch—were increasingly seen as Satan's spouses. Such is the narrative arc of Dyan Elliott's significant recent study of sponsa Christi (bride of Christ), The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. Elliott points toward the incarnational logic of Christianity in general and the type of physically immanent bridal mysticism that flourished among late medieval women in particular to locate some of the dynamic forces that helped make possible the theological ideas about witches that flourished from the fifteenth century onward. Elliott has done much to enrich our understanding of the development of an embodied version of the bride of Christ. Medieval and early modern Christianity held out an option, for women at least, to marry Jesus—to become a sponsa Christi—in a literal sense, a form of marriage sustained by such things as legal mechanisms, theological visions, particular emotions, religious rituals, and spiritual practices. But Elliott's argument, stopping as it does right before the tumultuous sixteenth century, lends itself to a reading that the literalized sponsa Christi was bound henceforth to the early modern witch craze. Desiderius Erasmus's 1529 treatise De vidua christiana provides us evidence that the literalized sponsa Christi developed in alternative ways in the early modern period, including the creation of a distinctive vision of the Christian widow who is, at times, bigamous. De vidua, then, can serve as the basis for expanding upon an alternative historical trajectory for the bride of Christ that Elliott mentions in passing in her study.

En este articulo se plantea que el desarrollo del tema de la locura en Memorias postumas de Blas Cubas del brasileiro Machado de Assis es una adaptacion del cuadro teorico de los planteamientos de Erasmo en Elogio. Un examen del dialogo entre estas dos obras muestra que no solo Memorias hace referencias directas e indirecta a Elogio, sino que tambien se apropia de los propositos encubiertos en esa obra que fueron estudiados por Foucault en Madness and Civilization. Esto lo lleva a cabo a traves de un efecto especular por medio del cual la critica hecha en Elogio contra el conocimiento de su tiempo se replantea y refleja en Memorias, manifestandose en un cuestionamiento de la sociedad de su tiempo y sus nociones del conocimiento y otros conceptos tales como razon y locura.