In July 1514 Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam left England for Basel, Switzerland, and the Froben Press to publish the annotated New Testament and the critical edition of the works of Saint Jerome on which he had been working during his stay at Cambridge. He left behind an imprint on the humanist tradition which would shape the output of every serious writer of the English Renaissance. In De duplici copia rerum ac verborum (On Abundance of Things and Words, 1512), a text intended to aid schoolboys in developing rhetorical felicity, he regrouped all discursive practices around a program of wide reading and note taking from the broadest array of classical literature available. Such work was intended to provide a speaker or writer with a storehouse of ideas, words, and phrases which might be deployed effectively as the spectrum of verbal situations he would confront demanded. Such eloquence became the aim and sign of an educated man, and those same qualities, naturalized in the education process, became the hallmark of the richest literary moment in English history.
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