Living the Vita Copiosa: Erasmus’s De duplici copia and the Presence of the Protean Jesus at St. Paul’s School Available to Purchase

This article reads the 1512 edition of Erasmus’s De duplici copia in the context of the school to which it was dedicated and the texts with which it was published. I argue that understanding Erasmus’s humanist educational thought and the role of Copia within it requires sustained attention to the figure on whom the conceptual and practical integrity of that education depends: the boy Jesus. The puer Jesus, whose presence filled the room at St. Paul’s School in London, was, for Erasmus, the essence of copiousness. Copia’s exercises for developing an abundant style, therefore, served to prepare the young scholars to express a transfigured, transforming Word in their ethical, epistemological, and political lives.