William Cecil’s copy of Erasmus’s Adagia
A recently cataloged item in our Rare Books Collection, a gift from Friend of the Library Frank J. Novak III, has an interesting provenance. The book in question is a 1533 Basel edition of humanist scholar Erasmus’s Adagia, an enormous collection of proverbs in Latin and Greek. It was issued in multiple editions from 1500-1536, each edition larger than the last as Erasmus found more entries culled from his reading of ancient literature. The Adagia is the source of many commonplace sayings in Western European languages, such as “the grass is greener over the fence,” “many hands make light work,” etc.
