Description

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, and reflections of his times.