Laudator Temporis Acti

Barbara C. Bowen, "Rabelais's Unreadable Books," Renaissance Quarterly 48.4 (Winter, 1995) 742-758 (at 746):

[Guillaume Budé's] De asse is typical of many Renaissance works whose dominant technique I like to call trivial pursuit; the Renaissance called it amplificatio. This technique, a natural result of the emphasis on copia in Renaissance education, consists in choosing a topos and then enumerating every possible example, illustration, or aspect of it, most basically in the form of a list, as in Erasmus's 200 variations on "As long as I live I shall remember you," Ravisius Textor's 38 successive chapters on strange and improbable deaths, or Jean Lemaire de Belges's descriptions of natural beauty by means of enumerations of flowers and trees. More sophisticated trivial pursuit can be found in the blasons of Marot (everything the poet can find to say about the lady's eyebrow) and in the Hymns of Ronsard (all the stories ever told about demons and other supernatural beings). Rabelais's trivial pursuit is often facetious: 217 children's games in 1:22, 63 verbs of violent motion in the third book prologue, 170 adjectives for tired testicles in 3:28; and sometimes serious, as in the detailed description of the Abbey of Thelema.