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.

Difficult parts but a useful text for rhetorical exercises. I will likely revisit portions of this in the future.

Practical advise for wordsmiths from a master.

Wikipedia article.

not good read :(

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.

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.