I am adding a small recurring feature to this blog: fables from Aesop, proverbs from the biblical wisdom literature, and the occasional adage from Erasmus’s Adagia. The new project page lays out the threefold rationale — literary, sapiential, and pedagogical — and grounds it in Luther’s own high regard for the form: his use of Aesop in the pulpit and at the Coburg fortress in 1530, his treatment of Proverbs as moral instruction sitting alongside Aesop and Cato, and his more uneasy reception of Erasmus’s Adagia. When possible I will accompany each entry with a Latin lesson.

Read the full piece: Why Fables, Proverbs, and Adages Are Joining the Rotation