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41th Erasmus Birthday Lecture: Katrin Ettenhuber ‘Erasmus Among the Dialecticians, Copia and its Discontents’ – 19 November (CANCELLED)

*Due to the current Covid regulations, this event is cancelled*

When: 19 November 2021
Where: Trippenhuis Building, Kloveniersburgwal 29 Amsterdam
Contact: congresbureau@knaw.nl 

In her Erasmus Birthday Lecture, Katrin Ettenhuber revisits Erasmus’ attitude towards the arts of reasoning, tracing a trajectory from The Praise of Folly and De Copia to his final work, Ecclesiastes.

Erasmus’ hostility towards the discipline of dialectic in his early writings is well known. In her Erasmus Birthday Lecture, Katrin Ettenhuber revisits Erasmus’ attitude towards the arts of reasoning, tracing a trajectory from The Praise of Folly and De Copia to his final work, Ecclesiastes. Erasmus’ treatise on preaching develops a new approach to copious speech and writing by combining the resources of rhetoric and dialectic, in dialogue with the textbooks on the arts of discourse that had appeared in the 25 years since the composition of The Praise of Folly.

Katrin Ettenhuber is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge (UK). She works on the connections between literature and religion in the early modern period, as well as on the history of logic and rhetoric. She has recently finished a book project, The Logical Renaissance: Literature, Argument and Cognition, 1479-1630; other major publications include Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (2011), vol. 5 of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (2015), and Renaissance Figures of Speech (2008), co-edited with Gavin Alexander and Sylvia Adamson.

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