L’«UMANESIMO CRISTIANO» NELL’ELOGIO DELLA FOLLIA DI ERASMO DA ROTTERDAM

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Review by Medioevo LAtino XLVII

L’«UMANESIMO CRISTIANO» NELL’ELOGIO DELLA FOLLIA DI ERASMO DA ROTTERDAM

Erasmus of Rotterdam’s in Elogio della Follia runs on the edge of a constant ambiguity due to the continuous association and dissociation that the persona loquens fixes with affirmations, condemnations, approvals, refusals; these are the same constants on which the author’s relationship with his speaking character is based, and, again, they are the same ones with which Erasmus coexists in his relationship with the culture of his time. Folly censors and exonerates, disowns and justifies behaviors considered sinful by a morality falsely evaluated, and therefore falsely considered wise, and instead positively received in their ‘mad wisdom’. That behind many existential choices, whose benefits everyone can enjoy, masked by the screen of Mwriva, of Stulticia, of Follia, there is the author's endorsement is a more than reasonable interpretative hypothesis, founded on sufficiently solid bases, not least the comfort, the ratification derived from the very participating word of the ancients, which would never have been exposed by the author to ridicule as an end in itself. At the same time, it is no less sustainable to think that the presentation, always emphatically exhibited, of options that are 'crazy' even to common sense is managed for a sort of compensatory purpose, so that it does not appear that Follia was always 'right', that the suggestions dispensed, the condemnations formulated, were always those of his author. The classical fragment in the texture of his speech seems to have been born with and for the Elogio, and not already taken and implanted in the Elogio. Erasmus does not resort to the ut ait … of the ancients themselves, nor does he imply it, that is, he does not use the citation technique that with that formula has often ensured the survival of textual fragments otherwise silenced forever. Let us, men of our time, treasure the Erasmian lesson, investigating ancient thought with the commitment to objectify in it projects that have their own form on contents profitably remodulated, in the belief that in the ordinariness of logic an ordinary ‘healthy madness’ must find a space.

Author

Crescenzo Formicola, former professor of Latin Literature in the DSU of the University of Naples Federico II, directs the journal of philological and historical studies «Vichiana» and is part of the scientific committee of the online journal «Scaena magistra». He edited the critical edition with translation, commentary and Concordantia of Grattius' Cynegeticon (Bologna, Pàtron, 1988), of the Pervigilium Veneris (Naples, Loffredo, 1988), of the third book Epistulae ex Ponto di Ovidio (Pisa-Rome, Serra, 2018); he translated and commented on l. IV of Tacitus' Annales (Naples, Loffredo, 2013); he translated Virgil's Georgiche into free verse in Italian (Naples, Loffredo, 2013). He is the author of a volume on the poetry of Virgil (Naples, Liguori, 2012) and of numerous essays on Latin poetry, from Catullus to Sidonius Apollinaris; he has dealt with the reception of the ancient with insights into the Ovidian presence in some novels by Sulman Rushdie (Pisa-Rome, Serra, 2019) and on the influence of Horace in the poetry of Montale (Naples, esi, 2021).