Get the latest tech news
Methodical Banality
Like today’s large language models, 16th-century humanists had techniques to automate writing – to the detriment of novelty
Rabelais was a monk, doctor, personal secretary and spy, but today he is mostly remembered for his five-part literary fiction about Gargantua and Pantagruel, a family of (literal) aristocratic giants who navigate life in 16th-century France while being much larger than everyone else. They internalised the qualities of their models’ prose as much as possible, and also kept a sort of verbal rainy-day fund in something called a commonplace book, which is to say that, as they read, they transcribed a stockpile of salient words, metaphors, turns of phrase and clichés – usually organised thematically – that they would then draw upon while writing. This insistence on maintaining conscious, executive control of the process of writing makes compositional fluidity impossible for him, to the point where he refuses to conjugate his verbs without first ascertaining whether Cicero used whichever particular inflected form he needs.
Or read this on Hacker News