Content

What shall one learn from this article?

Starting with a general introduction to the relationship of philology and humanism, readers of this article will be able to have a critical understanding of quotation practices and their use in philological discourses of the Early Modern period. They will understand that, in contrast to modern academia, quotation was terminologically and methodologically less fixed than today, and that it was used to imitate, to emulate and also to attack philological meanings not compatible with the own.

Which is the research corpus for this article?

In this article, there will be dealt with a quite unknown text called Dialogus, De imitatione Ciceroniana, published by the French humanist Étienne Dolet in 1535 (printer Sebastian Gryphius, Lyon; edited by Telle 1974). The text is a dialogue in which one of the dialogue partners quotes considerable passages of Erasmus of Rotterdam's dialogue Ciceronianus sive De optimo genere dicendi, published 1528 (printer Hieronymus Froben, Basel; edited by Mesnard 1971). These two texts are considered as important examples to show the development of philology in mid 16th century by the method of quoting one another's text.