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On Copia of Words and Ideas
Excellent Book
- GenresNonfictionWriting
118 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
About the author
Erasmus
1,421 books463 followersDesiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (28 October 1466 – 12 July 1536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian.
Erasmus was a classical scholar and wrote in a pure Latin style. Among humanists he enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists", and has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists". Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament, which raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. He also wrote On Free Will, The Praise of Folly, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, Julius Exclusus, and many other works.
Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious Reformation, but while he was critical of the abuses within the Catholic Church and called for reform, he kept his distance from Luther and Melanchthon and continued to recognise the authority of the pope, emphasizing a middle way with a deep respect for traditional faith, piety and grace, rejecting Luther's emphasis on faith alone. Erasmus remained a member of the Roman Catholic Church all his life, remaining committed to reforming the Church and its clerics' abuses from within. He also held to the Catholic doctrine of free will, which some Reformers rejected in favor of the doctrine of predestination. His middle road approach disappointed and even angered scholars in both camps.
Erasmus died suddenly in Basel in 1536 while preparing to return to Brabant, and was buried in the Basel Minster, the former cathedral of the city. A bronze statue of him was erected in his city of birth in 1622, replacing an earlier work in stone.
Erasmus was a classical scholar and wrote in a pure Latin style. Among humanists he enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists", and has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists". Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament, which raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. He also wrote On Free Will, The Praise of Folly, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, Julius Exclusus, and many other works.
Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious Reformation, but while he was critical of the abuses within the Catholic Church and called for reform, he kept his distance from Luther and Melanchthon and continued to recognise the authority of the pope, emphasizing a middle way with a deep respect for traditional faith, piety and grace, rejecting Luther's emphasis on faith alone. Erasmus remained a member of the Roman Catholic Church all his life, remaining committed to reforming the Church and its clerics' abuses from within. He also held to the Catholic doctrine of free will, which some Reformers rejected in favor of the doctrine of predestination. His middle road approach disappointed and even angered scholars in both camps.
Erasmus died suddenly in Basel in 1536 while preparing to return to Brabant, and was buried in the Basel Minster, the former cathedral of the city. A bronze statue of him was erected in his city of birth in 1622, replacing an earlier work in stone.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 2, 2011
A textbook on the canon of style from the discipline of Rhetoric. Erasmus has a sharp wit and likes to show it off. There is one section of the book with over 100 variations of the same sentence! Erasmus's summaries are very short, which makes it difficult to know exactly how to use the figure, and sometimes the terms get confusing, but the book is a very brief intro to a very interesting subject--eloquence.
June 2, 2011
You got to love a man who can say "I was pleased to receive your letter" for 8 straight single-spaced, no-paragraphed pages. And love him I do. Copia isn't just mindless "heaping" in any way--it's finding the "available means" of language. Even those wanting to be brief, as Erasmus points out in the last section, can first know what they COULD say before deciding what they WILL say. What a stud.
January 2, 2014
Originally written as a rhetoric textbook, Erasmus’ Copia “put[s] forward some ideas on copia, the abundant style … treating its two aspects of content and expression, and giving some examples and pattern” (295). In both his theory and his examples, Erasmus draws copiously from Quintilian and Cicero, “the great father of all eloquence” (297). He claims that learning the abundant style is the best way for students to learn brevity as well as copiousness, and that it is an especially appropriate style for students as “the excessive growth can easily be cut back by criticism … while it is impossible to do anything to improve a thin … style” (300). He encourages students to compete and compare abundant compositions “on a common theme” and to set “elegant” Latin as their ideal (304). Following these prefatory remarks, he turns to abundance of expression, discussing and offering almost endless examples of synonyms, enallage, various figures such as metaphor and its varieties (e.g. allegory and synecdoche), and methods of transitioning between clauses and sentences. The second half of the book treats “abundance of subject-matter” (572), covering how description, digression, examples, and comparisons can provide a student of rhetoric with such an abundance. Many of these approaches to abundance seem to draw fairly directly on the exercises of the progymnasmata. Animal metaphors abound.
February 22, 2026
A toolbox for expressing thoughts in different ways and making them persuasive.
College writing drilled into me that, in general, a paper has too many paragraphs, a paragraph too many sentences, and a sentence too many words.
This book is about the other direction. You have stripped the argument of everything but the core logic. How do you expand on it, amplify it, and explain it in different shapes to be compelling. Why don’t we teach that anymore?
Book 1 is about being abundant with words. For example, using synonyms, synecdoche, and enallage. To illustrate the methods, he writes the sentence “Your letter pleased me greatly” in 150 different variations. I find it sometimes hard to say things differently when explaining something and not just repeat myself, and this helps a lot.
Book 2 is about being abundant in expressing a thought, which I found more interesting. He shows how to make an argument more compelling through:
- Enumerating the details of a claim. E.g., instead of saying “He lost everything through excess”, enumerating all the things that he accumulated in life and all the ways in which he lost them.
- Instead of stating a claim directly, stating a lot of smaller claims that together imply the larger claim.
- Making an argument impressionistically: “If someone should say that a city was captured, he doubtless comprehends in that general statement everything that attends such fortune, but if you develop what is implicit in the one word, flames will appear pouring through homes and temples; the crash of falling buildings will be heard, and one indefinable sound of diverse outcries …”
- Making arguments incrementally or by comparison: “It is an offence to fetter a Roman citizen, a crime to flog him, treason to kill him, what shall I say it is to crucify him”
- Making an argument by showing how a general truth applies here (“sententiae”)
- Contrasting: clarifying what you’re saying by stressing what you’re not saying
- And many more
highly recommend
College writing drilled into me that, in general, a paper has too many paragraphs, a paragraph too many sentences, and a sentence too many words.
This book is about the other direction. You have stripped the argument of everything but the core logic. How do you expand on it, amplify it, and explain it in different shapes to be compelling. Why don’t we teach that anymore?
Book 1 is about being abundant with words. For example, using synonyms, synecdoche, and enallage. To illustrate the methods, he writes the sentence “Your letter pleased me greatly” in 150 different variations. I find it sometimes hard to say things differently when explaining something and not just repeat myself, and this helps a lot.
Book 2 is about being abundant in expressing a thought, which I found more interesting. He shows how to make an argument more compelling through:
- Enumerating the details of a claim. E.g., instead of saying “He lost everything through excess”, enumerating all the things that he accumulated in life and all the ways in which he lost them.
- Instead of stating a claim directly, stating a lot of smaller claims that together imply the larger claim.
- Making an argument impressionistically: “If someone should say that a city was captured, he doubtless comprehends in that general statement everything that attends such fortune, but if you develop what is implicit in the one word, flames will appear pouring through homes and temples; the crash of falling buildings will be heard, and one indefinable sound of diverse outcries …”
- Making arguments incrementally or by comparison: “It is an offence to fetter a Roman citizen, a crime to flog him, treason to kill him, what shall I say it is to crucify him”
- Making an argument by showing how a general truth applies here (“sententiae”)
- Contrasting: clarifying what you’re saying by stressing what you’re not saying
- And many more
highly recommend
June 20, 2018
Difficult parts but a useful text for rhetorical exercises. I will likely revisit portions of this in the future.
April 13, 2021
not good read :(
Want to Read
May 21, 2022Wikipedia article.
March 2, 2017
Practical advise for wordsmiths from a master.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews