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

Erasmus’ 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 i...