There is hardly a sixteenth-century genre that Erasmus did not try, often ambitiously. He made big books from little things: proverbs, anecdotes, metaphors, quotations, and textual notes. The works that have withstood the tests of time are satires and edited collections: Praise of Folly, Julius exclusus, the Adagia, letters, and colloquies. There are no better introductions to Erasmus than these, and they share a common emphasis on variety. Erasmus' Miniatures examines his lifelong interest in small genres and his use of them, inserting them into larger works or gradually amassing them in books of a thousand pages. They were written to teach Latin and inculcate Christian values, and remain attractive as the most intimate expressions of his thoughts, moods, hopes, and terrors.
