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Erasmus of Rotterdam, the eminent Renaissance scholar and educator, inaugurates his satirical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) with a trenchant depiction of Nosoponus, a character rendered almost comically incapacitated by an obsessive commitment to stylistic purity. Structured dialogically, the treatise features two seasoned interlocutors, Bulephorus and Hypologus, laboring to disabuse Nosoponus of his counterproductive infatuation with literary perfection. Nosoponus, emblematic of the paralytic tendencies wrought by unrelenting aesthetic idealism, confesses that the mere composition of a perfunctory letter requesting the return of borrowed books would demand for him weeks of agonized rewriting. So intense is the concentration demanded by his craft that he can only attempt it nocturnally, insulated from the distractions of the waking world. Yet even in this solitude, his perfectionism proves tyrannical, with a single sentence devouring the span of an entire night, only to yield yet further dissatisfaction and, ultimately, surrender.

This predicament, though temporally distant, remains conceptually proximate. Who among us has not agonized over the composition of a seemingly innocuous email? Contemporary society, however, proffers an expedient: large language models (LLMs), which, upon receiving Nosoponus’s intended message, promptly generate a polished version—anodyne, competent, yet arguably devoid of idiosyncrasy. But the Renaissance too offered its own remedy. A humanist education fashioned in Erasmus’s mold equipped students with the capacity to compose with fluency and versatility on virtually any subject. François Rabelais, a polyglot intellectual and contemporary of Erasmus, discerned in these techniques a form of mechanical composition that, anachronistically, parallels the function of modern LLMs. Yet Rabelais, far from uncritical, intimated that such automation, while rhetorically effective, ultimately hollows out language’s moral and political potency.

Rabelais’s satirical fiction, particularly Gargantua (1534), confronts this paradox. His humanist characters, though articulate, often seem more intent on displaying their educational pedigree than conveying substantive meaning. Their language, redolent of cultivated elegance, risks devolving into ornate vacuity. In instances such as Grandgousier’s letter or Ulrich Gallet’s anti-war oration—both deployed in an effort to thwart impending conflict—language becomes generic, competent but inert. These texts, clearly modeled on Erasmian pedagogical exercises, fail to forestall violence, their eloquence ironically accelerating the very strife they sought to avert.

The root of this failure lies in the mechanization of expression. Humanist students were trained by reading and rereading classical exemplars, extracting memorable turns of phrase into meticulously organized commonplace books. These repositories of linguistic material—akin to a training corpus—served as compositional scaffolds. Eclectic writers diversified their influences, while Ciceronians restricted themselves exclusively to Cicero, reducing their stylistic range to a homogenous imitation. For Bulephorus, the commonplace book is a safety net; for Nosoponus, a regulatory mechanism necessitating rigorous verification of every lexical choice against the Ciceronian canon—so much so that even verb conjugation becomes an exercise in archival exactitude.

This insistence on unflinching authorial control, paradoxically, annihilates spontaneity. Erasmus, by contrast, sought to cultivate rhetorical agility, prompting students with fictional scenarios and historical simulations to engender a dynamic responsiveness to context. Yet in Rabelais’s fiction, the tragic irony is that these cultivated speakers, in deploying language as a tool of negotiation, wield forms too stale and too recognizable to be persuasive. The automation of language—be it through Erasmian exercises or contemporary LLMs—presupposes that novelty can always be decomposed into familiar semantic units. This assumption renders speakers blind to the unprecedented, their responses calibrated to past utterances rather than emergent exigencies. Thus, what ought to have been a prophylactic plea becomes a rehearsed failure: eloquent, predictable, and ultimately ineffectual.

Word Count: 598
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 18.

Glossary of Difficult Words:

  1. Polemical – strongly critical or controversial writing or speech

  2. Interlocutors – participants in a conversation or dialogue

  3. Perfunctory – done with minimal effort or reflection

  4. Anodyne – bland or inoffensive

  5. Idiosyncrasy – a distinctive or peculiar feature or characteristic

  6. Polyglot – knowing or using several languages

  7. Anachronistically – out of chronological order; belonging to a different time

  8. Intimated – suggested or hinted at subtly

  9. Redolent – suggestive or reminiscent of something

  10. Vacuity – lack of thought or substance

  11. Homogenous – of the same or similar kind or nature

  12. Prophylactic – intended to prevent something, especially disease or misfortune

  13. Lexical – relating to the words or vocabulary of a language

  14. Canonical – conforming to orthodox or established rules

  15. Exigencies – urgent needs or demands

  16. Proffers – offers or proposes

  17. Trenchant – vigorous or incisive in expression or style

  18. Scaffold – a temporary structure used to support construction, here metaphorically meaning support for writing


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