The tide started turning against the etymologists during the Renaissance. In Praise of Folly , Erasmus mocked the theologians for their obsessions with the minutiae of words: “I met with another, some eighty years of age, and such a divine that you’d have sworn Scotus himself was revived in him. He, being upon the point of unfolding the mystery of the name Jesus, did with wonderful subtlety demonstrate that there lay hidden in those letters whatever could be said of him; for that it was only declined with three cases, he said, it was a manifest token of the Divine Trinity; and then, that the first ended in S, the second in M, the third in U, there was in it an ineffable mystery, to wit, those three letters declaring to us that he was the beginning, middle, and end (summum, medium, et ultimum) of all. Nay, the mystery was yet more abstruse; for he so mathematically split the word Jesus into two equal parts that he left the middle letter by itself, and then told us that that letter in Hebrew was schin or sin, and that sin in the Scotch tongue, as he remembered, signified as much as sin; from whence he gathered that it was Jesus that took away the sins of the world. At which new exposition the audience were so wonderfully intent and struck with admiration, especially the theologians, that there wanted little but that Niobe-like they had been turned to stones; whereas the like has almost happened to me, as befell the Priapus in Horace.”

In his dialogue on names and things in his Colloquies , Erasmus has his character Beatus comment, “But if Man is a rational Animal, how contrary is it to Reason, that in the Conveniencies, rather than the real Goods of the Body, and in external Things, which Fortune gives and takes away at her Pleasure; we had rather have the Thing itself than the Name; and in the real Goods of the Mind, we put more Value upon the Name, than the Thing itself.”

 

The satirical Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum (1516) also defended the new learning and presented inane etymologies. In his book on Ulrich von Hutten, DF Strauss notes some examples: “Their derivations also are on a par with their knowledge of languages. Mavors (Mars) the God of War, is the man-eater, mares varans; Mcrcurius, he qui mercatores curat. Magister is either compounded of magis and ter, because he must know three times as much as any one else, or else of magis and terreo, because he should inspire his pupils with fear.”

As Frank Borchardt points out, though (in a 1968 JHI article), Erasmus does not stick with his own strictures: “In his colloquies Erasmus regularly used names precisely in the fashion he satirized in ‘On Things and Names.’ Erasmus’s Folly abused the etymologizing theologian, but this did not keep Erasmus himself from using the old locus of the name in the dedication of the Praise of Folly to Thomas More: More’s surname is as like the Greek word for folly as More himself is unlike it.” And the character who attacks the medieval obsession with words is named “Beatus.”

Borchardt concludes, “Fanciful etymology clearly remained, despite all Humanist attacks, a means of embellishing a literary work, of defining a subject of dispute, of carrying out argumentation, and of coming to new knowledge.”

But he does see a shift in the use of etymology. Felix Fabri, a Dominican monk (1441-1502), had one foot in the Middle Ages and one in the Renaissance. He considered etymology a legitimate method of learning about the past, and offered this acrostic etymology for the name of his town, Ulam: ” unitas, legum observationes, modus, ad . . . deum .” Yet, he used the etymology not to link the city to redemptive history, but patriotically, to raise the past of Ulum to the level of Rome. Another historian from Erfurt “drew on etymology to explain the antiquity or virtue of his subjects: the Thuringians were so called ( Duringi ) because they were from time immemorial duri , hard, persevering at labor and making war; Luneberg is so called because the ancient Romans made the Thuringians worship Luna.”

Etymological studies in the northern Renaissance, he says, “were normally made in order to demonstrate the great antiquity and general superiority of one nation and its language as over against other nations and their languages.”