Forging a Community: Erasmus, Copia and the Practice of Discontinuous Reading
For Erasmus, copia, by which he meant abundance of discourse, was the key to reviving and emulating ancient rhetorical practice. Erasmus, who never taught and probably never addressed a crowd, still followed his venerated teacher, the Frisian humanist Rudolph Agricola, in gearing his rhetorical efforts towards a near-native oral fluency. Both explicitly discuss their methods – Agricola in De inventione dialectica, Erasmus in De duplici copia rerum ac verborum – as enabling the practitioner to address either large crowds or intimate gatherings in idiomatic Latin. Erasmus speaks of an uninterrupted stream of speech as the ultimate goal to be achieved. The technique for getting there, however, was marked by discontinuity: copia is acquired through gathering bits and pieces from the ancient authors, including turns of phrase, idiomatic expressions, exempla, and loci communes. This involves reading practices that are informed by discontinuity, breaking up texts for further use, and commonplacing for future production. In this talk, I will show that these two ideas, fluency of speech and discontinuous reading, are not only inextricably intertwined in a second-language environment, but that both point to a larger desire: namely, that of forging a community in time and through time, a community with the ancients. My reading of the notion of copia is that it is not primarily about plenty, but about taking possession.
