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Kathy Eden, "Friends Hold All Things in Common": Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the "Adages" of Erasmus. Yale UP, 2001, ix+194 pp., ISBN 0-300-08757-8, £25.
What in the end is this short but complex and learned book about? It is about how Erasmus as a Christian appropriated the pagan classical tradition or a particular classical tradition, or about how the Christian and the classical are related in his thought. Put in such general terms, the subject is, of course, not new. Much has been written on his relation to Plato and Cicero and, from his life-time on, the matter has attracted controversy. But the virtue here, as so often, is in the detail.
The key concepts initially are friendship and property. What might be the link between them? The adage which Erasmus put first in his great, and frequently revised, collection of proverbs Adagia) provides the clue: "Friends hold all things in common". In legal terms, the issue was how personal property was transferred from one to another (the technical term was traditio). Philosophically speaking, restating the issue in human and personal rather than technical terms, we think of a sharing among friends. "Speaking philosophically" means, for this study, referring above all to Plato and, behind him, Pythagoras.
Thus a third key concept comes into view: tradition. Tradition is the transfer to us of goods from the past. For the late-medieval Christian culture, that could not be a simple matter; it posed the problem of how the Christian and the classical were to be related. Can Christians take over the classical intellectual tradition as they had taken up the scriptural and apostolic traditions?...