Erasmus's "First Reader": The Colloquies in Early English Pedagogy

Abstract

Erasmus's "First Reader":The Colloquies in Early English Pedagogy Dennis M. Gilkey (bio) Although the achievement of Erasmus is now measured by the Praise of Folly, the Adages, and the Greek New Testament, to his own generation he was an educator above all, and a leader in pedagogical reform. A slow student at Gouda and an impatient student at Deventer, Erasmus later complained repeatedly of both the subject and method of his own earliest instruction. Because of these experiences, Erasmus began while still in school to recommend, to anyone who would listen, the dropping of the standard medieval textbooks—he most frequently mentioned those of Papias, Uguccio, Eberhard, John of Garland, and Isidore—and their replacement by Donatus unencumbered by medieval dialectic, by classical rhetoric, and by a reading of the best authors. In later years, Erasmus himself showed the way with a plan of study (De Ratione Studii), a grammar (De Construction), a style-book (De Copia), and such ancillary texts as a summary of Valla's handbook of usage (De Elegantia), a guide to letter writing (De Conscribendis Epistolis), and a dialogue on the correct pronunciation of Greek and Latin (De Pronuntiatione). Many of these Erasmus composed at the request of friends and colleagues; others, on his own, as a means of earning additional income. But a unique situation during his second residence at the University of Paris in 1496-97 led to the composition, some years later, of what at first appeared to be yet another school-text, but which grew instead into something not only larger, but broader in scope and appeal: the Colloquies. Begun as conversational formulae for tutoring his students in colloquial Latin, the Colloquies had grown, by 1533, to include some fifty-seven comic, satiric, and dramatic dialogues: suddenly, Craig Thompson says, the book became literature. The popularity of the work was unrivaled; but with popularity came controversy. Censured by the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne and the theologians of Louvain, Erasmus was accused, like Socrates, of corrupting youth. His opinions on religious superstition, monasteries, marriage, pilgrimages, and fasting, all dramatized in the Colloquies, assured this sort of response from his enemies and adult readers. And because the Colloquies survive today as social, political, and religious satire, we sometimes forget that the real provenance of the work, both as pedagogy and literature, was the schools. Joan Simon, though acknowledging their use in the curriculum, calls the Colloquies "hardly suitable for the schoolboy" (p. 108-9). But suitable they apparently were, and also popular, surviving in English and American schools into this century. What we have failed to understand is that this collection of familiar Latin conversations had, quite apart from its obvious pedagogical value, an appeal to a juvenile audience corresponding to, but somewhat different from, its appeal to adult readers. It wasn't that Erasmus put an adult work into the schools; rather, adult readers, ignoring the nature and function of the work, appropriated a school-text for themselves. Part of the problem is that we have little information about early school editions; we must rely instead on later editions, selections, and translations in which Erasmus himself had no hand. Nevertheless, we do have sufficient evidence from Erasmus's correspondence, from school statutes, and from related documents with which to reconstruct the growth of this work from linguistic textbook to juvenile reader. As early as 1489, in a letter to a friend, Erasmus had argued that students were not only wasting valuable years being drilled in grammatical forms and syntactical rules, but also that they [End Page 24] were learning a Latin hybrid from the vocabularies, glossaries, and vulgaria; instead of good, colloquial Latin, a language that was half-Latin half-French. This was the fault, in part, of their ignorant masters; in part, of a school requirement that they converse in Latin in everyday situations, with only the Latin of the day as a model. Erasmus advised his friend to learn to speak ancient, colloquial Latin by reading and practicing the language of Terence: The style of his comedies is wonderfully pure, choice, and elegant, with very little roughness, considering that he is a comic writer of such early...