Adages and emblems: images of a European moral philosophy
A searchable edition of Erasmus' Adagiorum chiliades, linked to the Collectanea of 1500, to the Loci Communes under which they were read, to Iconclass, and to the emblem books that helped disseminate its ideas across Europe.
Explore
Eight doors, depending on whether you start from a proverb, a theme, a picture or a word.
The Adagia
All 4,151 adages in order, by chiliad and centuria, with Latin text, English translation and a digital facsimile of the Froben edition of 1559.
Collectanea (1500)
Erasmus's first collection, and where its entries reappear in the later Adagia.
Index by Iconclass
Adages grouped by the Iconclass codes that describe their imagery: animals, plants, gods, objects.
Emblems inspired by adages
Emblem books, and the emblems in them that draw on Erasmian adages.
Visual Emblem Survey
A grid of emblem illustrations, each linked back to the adage it relates to.
Search
Full-text search across the edition, or Advanced Search with AND and NOT for each individual adage.
About the project
Erasmus's Adagia grew from 818 proverbs in 1500 to more than four thousand in the edition of 1536. Each one is a short essay on a saying from antiquity, and together they were a storehouse of images, morals and quotations for readers all over Europe.
Emblem writers took from that storehouse. A proverb such as Festina lente or Dulce bellum inexpertis could become a motto, a picture and a verse. This site follows those paths from the adage to the emblem and back, and every adage can be read alongside the digital facsimile of the Froben edition of 1559.
Each adage is tied to a Locus Communis, the theme under which humanist readers filed it, and to Iconclass notations that describe what it shows. Those two shared vocabularies connect the adages to each other and to the emblem books.
New emblems are found by transcribing the book pages and matching them against the adages, through the motto, the commentary, the Loci Communes and Iconclass. Every suggestion is checked by an editor before it is added.