Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus

Journal article

1 online resource

9780300133646 eBook

Erasmus's Adages—a vast collection of the proverbial wisdom of Greek and Roman antiquity—was published in 1508 and became one of the most influential works of the Renaissance. It also marked a turning point in the history of Western thinking about literary property. At once a singularly successful commercial product of the new printing industry and a repository of intellectual wealth, the Adages looks ahead to the development of copyright and back to an ancient philosophical tradition that ideas should be universally shared in the spirit of friendship. This book focuses on both the commitment to friendship and common property that Erasmus shares with his favorite philosophers—Pythagoras, Plato, and Christ—and the early history of private property that gradually transformed European attitudes concerning the right to copy. In the process it accounts for the peculiar shape of Erasmus's collection of more than 3,000 proverbs and provides readings of such ancient philosophical and religious thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Iamblichus, Tertullian, Basil, Jerome, and Augustine.

Online resource

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001

English