SOURCE: Carrington, Laurel. “Erasmus on the Use and Abuse of Metaphor.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, edited by Alexander Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi, and Richard J. Schoeck, pp. 111-20. Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1991.

In this lecture read at a 1988 conference, Carrington links Erasmus's work on metaphor and ideal language to his theology. She contends that, for Erasmus, metaphor is both the sign of a fallen language and the means through which divinely inspired understanding of scripture can occur.

Although my paper's title points to Erasmus's concerns about metaphor, my actual subject draws on a series of issues of which this is only a part. To begin with, the place of metaphor in the classical discipline of rhetoric is extremely important, as is Erasmus's complex relationship to that tradition. Erasmus's use of metaphor in his...