Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common:
Tradition,
Intellectual Property and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2001), x + 194pp, ISBN 0300087578
Erasmus’ Adages of 1508 opened with the proverb ‘Friends hold all things
in common’. This provides Kathy Eden with her starting point for an
analysis of the themes of friendship and property in the history of ideas from
Homer to the Renaissance, with a particular view to their relationship with
tradition, inheritance and evolving ideas about intellectual property in the
age of print. The Adages were a storehouse of the accumulated intellectual
wealth of Greek and Roman antiquity, which Erasmus produced, published
and collected in the context of a series of strategic friendships. It was an
instant best-seller.
Eden’s book traces the evolution of Erasmus’ thinking about the
relationship between the Classical and Christian traditions.
From
conceiving it as an adversarial relationship, figured in terms of despoiled
Egyptian property (supplex Aegyptia) and more specifically the topos of the
‘captive woman’ found in Paul, Origen and Jerome, Erasmus recasts it in
terms of joint-ownership of a common inheritance, i.e. in terms of common
property freely shared among friends. Eden looks back to Plato’s
Symposium in search of the origins of Erasmus’ claim for the commonalities
between a Christian philosophy and its Pythagorean and Platonic
antecedents. She argues that Socrates’ victory in the contest for the right to
determine cultural value was a key pre-cursor of the self-authorisation
implicit in Eramus’ own educational programme and philosophia Christi.
Engagement with the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions underlies
his assertion that philosophy was the best means of education (with
education being understood not as a static value but in the sense of an
educated way of life). The philosopher, in this way, played a pivotal role
for him in bequeathing the tools necessary for each individual to choose the
right kind of life and cultivate virtue and wisdom.
The next chapter moves on to the alignment of proverbial statement
and philosophy, and a consideration of the relationship between the practice
of rhetoric and transmission of knowledge. Rather than advocating that in
accordance with the philosophia Christi princes divest themselves of their
wealth, Erasmus recommended they pay attention to a far more valuable
kind of property, intellectual property. Property was at the heart of the
political philosophy of all the classical authors Erasmus cited in his exegesis
of the opening adage on friendship and property. He draws an analogy
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between the holding of property in common among friends and early
cenobitic monasticism. His approval of the ideal that friends hold all things
in common, however, was challenged by his thinking about intellectual and
particularly literary property. The Adages addressed the anxiety of the few
about the divulging of a classical heritage, which made the many bookowners proprietors of the wisdom of the ancients. The proverb is by
definition a literary form that resists individual ownership, representing a
shared, collective wisdom passed on from generation to generation.
Erasmus lionised the scholar-publisher, who made this storehouse available,
and argued that the extension of the borders of the intellectual community
was a feat of greater power and prestige than the mere widening of material
boundaries. This represents a shift from imperium to studium. Such an
analogy allowed him to argue in the dedication to his edition of the Letters
of Jerome that a proprietory right was generated by the intellectual labour of
a scholar, even while the heirs to an intellectual tradition might expect to
share in its riches without being accused of the offence of trespass.
This book is densely written and suffused with classical language.
While it makes heavy demands on its reader, the scholarly analysis offers
insight into a fascinating moment of intellectual history.
Alexander Samson
University of Warwick
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