Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style
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Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (Latin: De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia) is a rhetorical guide written by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus in 1512. It is Erasmus' systematic instruction on how to embellish, amplify, and give variety to speech and writing.
The subject of Copia is the ability to express oneself through the "abundant style." Erasmus theorizes that in order to persuade an audience, it is important that a rhetor have as many options as possible to give variety to their message. Knowledge and clarity are important, but these gifts are slighted if the speaker or writer is short on abundance of style.
"If in these circumstances we find ourselves destitute of verbal riches and hesitate, or keep singing out the same old phrase like a cuckoo, and are unable to clothe our thought in other colors or other forms, we shall look ridiculous when we show ourselves to be so tongue-tied, and we shall also bore our wretched audience to death."
The text is divided into two books. Book I ultimately consisted of 206 chapters, while Book II is not sectioned off.
Book I:
Chapters 1-12 A discussion of the general nature and value of the abundant style
Chapters 13 - 33 An analysis of major tropes in classical literature: synecdoche, equivalence, allegory, etc. Chapter 33 is a famous demonstration of variety, where Erasmus illustrates 195 variations on the sentence, "Your letter pleased me greatly". (Latin: tuae litterae me magnopere delectarunt)
Chapters 34-94 Features variations of grammatical and syntactic forms
'Chapters 94 - 206 Operates like a Thesaurus, although the organization is haphazard, not alphabetical
Book II : Abundance of Subject Matter
Not divided into chapters, but does address 11 separate methods of using abundant subject matter. Here Erasmus uses a more dialectical approach, and typically gives a few lines of theory followed by many illustrations from classical sources.
Erasmus wrote Copia while a professor at the University of Cambridge in 1511. He was teaching Greek , but between courses composed several texts designed to instruct Latin. Copia was one such text, perhaps as an attempt to expand on Quintillian's rhetorical guide, Institutio Oratoria.
The first chapter of book 10 in Quintillian's Oratoria is titled "de copia verborum". This is quite possibly where Erasmus received his most direct inspiration for the book. In that 10th chapter, Quintillian declined to give examples for employing the abundant style, on the grounds that each individual case requires a unique solution. This left the door open for Erasmus to detail the abundant style in Copia.
Erasmus acknowledges Quintillian in the preface, and borrows from him (and other classical authors) throughout Copia, sometimes citing, sometimes not. As further revisions of Copia are printed, Erasmus becomes increasingly careful to give credit to previous authors where it is due.
If Quintillian was the philosophical inspiration for Copia, his friend John Colet was most practically responsible. Colet and Erasmus had designs on replacing Medieval teaching with classical Greek and Latin writings. While Erasmus was at Cambridge, Colet was teaching at St. Paul's school in London. Colet requested that Erasmus pen something on rhetoric for him to teach at St. Paul's, and Erasmus presented him with Copia, dedicating the book to Colet in the preface.
While designed as a university text book, Copia enjoyed far broader appeal. The book was immensely popular in England and in Europe, at least 85 editions of the book were printed in Erasmus' own lifetime, and countless more after that. Erasmus made three separate revisions to the original text, adding chapters each time. The original 1512 edition contained 153 chapters, which swelled to 206 in the final version that Erasmus completed before his death.
