In Praise of Folly

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: PAUL NEGRI

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: T. N. R. ROGERS

Copyright

Copyright © 2003 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2003, is an unabridged republication of a standard text of John Wilson’s 1668 translation into English of Encomium Moriae, which was written in 1509 and first published in 1511. A new introductory Note has been prepared especially for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536.

[Moriae encomium. English]

In praise of folly / Desiderius Erasmus.

p. cm.

This is an unabridged republication of a standard text of John Wilson’s 1668 translation into English of Encomium moriae, which was written in 1509 and first published in 1511—Publisher’s info.

9780486111902

1. Folly—Early works to 1800. I. Title.

PA8514 .E5 2003

873’.04—dc21

2002034928

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Note

ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM to his friend THOMAS MORE, health:

THE PRAISE OF FOLLY - An oration, of feigned matter, spoken by Folly in her own person

Note

MORE than anyone else Desiderius Erasmus stands as the symbol of humanism. He was the best-known scholar of what became known as the Northern Renaissance and was probably the most influential scholar of all time—the friend and confidant of popes and princes, and a man so famous that one of his friends is said to have confessed: I am pointed out in public as the man who has received a letter from Erasmus.

Erasmus was born in Rotterdam, Holland, on October 27, probably in 1466, and died at Basel, Switzerland, on July 12, 1536.¹ The facts of his early life are by no means clear, but it seems that he was born out of wedlock, the second son of Margaret, a physician’s daughter, and a priest named Roger Gerard. His love of learning was awakened during the ten years he spent at a school in Deventer run by the celebrated humanist Alexander Hegius. But around 1484 both of his parents died, and he and his brother were left to the care of guardians who sent them not to university, as he would have liked, but to a rigid school that prepared them for monastic careers. Though Erasmus went on to be ordained a priest in 1492, he was never happy with that life and a couple of years later leapt at the opportunity to leave and become Latin secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai. That appointment led him step by step to the freedom of the life of a wandering scholar, and in 1499, at the invitation of Lord Mountjoy, one of the pupils he had taken in Paris, he made his first trip to England.

It was a momentous journey for him. Though he never became quite used to the English weather or the English beer, he found England a congenial place and became fast friends with John Colet, Thomas More, Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn, and other humanists at Oxford, who admired him for his learning, his restless intellect, and his humor. Colet inspired Erasmus to reconcile Christianity with humanism through a thorough study of the Scriptures in the manner of the early church fathers, and when he returned to the continent in 1500 he set out to master Greek, which he realized would be necessary for such study. In 1500 he brought out his first edition of the Adagia, a collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, and in 1503 the Enchiridion militis christiani (Handbook of the Christian Knight). In 1506, with the help of his English friends (who had gotten him a position as tutor to the sons of the future Henry VIII’s physician), Erasmus was able to travel to Italy, where he was warmly welcomed by other humanists, by several cardinals in Rome (including one who would become Pope Leo X), and by the Venice printer Aldus Manutius, for whom Erasmus expanded his Adagia into a monumental collection with over 3,000 entries. But in 1509, after hearing that Henry VIII had just ascended to the throne, he set out for England.² During the long journey to England (most of it on horseback) he conceived the idea of Encomium moriae, The Praise of Folly. He set it to paper at the home of Thomas More.

As noted above, Erasmus had met More during his first visit to England, when More was only twenty-three. According to a well-known story, they first met when they were seated across from each other at the dining table of the Lord Mayor of London. Their reputations had preceded them, and they did not have to be introduced; their conversation was so animated and witty that Erasmus exclaimed Aut tu es Morus, aut nullus (Either you’re More or no one), and More replied, Aut tu es Erasmus, aut diabolus! (Either you’re Erasmus or the devil). Probably the story is apocryphal, but it is true in showing the warmth and admiration the two men felt for each other right from the start. This is a brief selection from a 1519 letter in which Erasmus described More at length:

His countenance answers to his character, having an expression of kind and friendly cheerfulness with a little air of raillery.... In company his extraordinary kindness and sweetness of temper are such as to cheer the dullest spirit, and alleviate the annoyance—of the most trying circumstances. From boyhood he was always so pleased with a joke, that it might seem that jesting was the main object of his life; but with all that, he did not go so far as buffoonery, nor had ever any inclination to bitterness. When quite a youth, he wrote farces and acted them. If a thing was facetiously said, even though it was aimed at himself, he was charmed with it, so much did he enjoy any witticism that had a flavour of subtlety or genius. This led to his amusing himself as a young man with epigrams, and taking great delight in Lucian. Indeed, it was he that suggested my writing the Moriae, or Praise of Folly, which was much the same thing as setting a camel to dance.³

As Erasmus notes in his dedicatory letter to Moriae, the book’s title was a pun on More’s surname. I was staying with More after my return from Italy, and I was kept several days in the house by an attack of lumbago. My books had not arrived, and even if they had, my illness forbade exertion in more serious studies. So, in order to have something to do, I began to amuse myself with The Praise of Folly, not with the intention of publishing the result but to relieve the discomfort of sickness by this sort of distraction. I showed a specimen of the unfinished work to some of my friends in order to heighten the enjoyment of all this ridiculousness by sharing it.

Though he originally regarded Moriae as a trifle, in 1511 he had it published in Paris, and within a few months it went through seven editions and raised a stir throughout Europe with its satirical observations on the stupidities and abuses of various classes of society, especially of the church. The work was an extraordinary best-seller; forty-two Latin editions appeared in Erasmus’s lifetime, and it was soon translated into French, German, and English. The present translation by John Wilson,⁴ rich with the rhetoric and phraseology of Restoration England, is something of a classic in its own right and has gone through numerous editions since first coming out in 1668.

In Praise of Folly is perhaps not the most historically important of Erasmus’s writings (maybe that honor would go to his new edition of the Greek New Testament, along with its Latin translation and paraphrases) but it is one of the most enjoyable. And, with his other writings, it was one of the books that led inexorably to Martin Luther and the Reformation. When Erasmus was accused of having laid the egg that Luther hatched, he acknowledged that he might have done so, but said he had expected quite another kind of a bird. Though he had criticized clerical abuses, he had never wanted to cause a rupture in the church, and he remained in its bosom till his death.⁵ Not very long after his death, the church published its first Index of Prohibited Books and put Erasmus down for posterity as one of the very dangerous Auctores quorum libri & scripta omnia prohibentur (authors whose books and writings are all prohibited).

What do you suppose the goddess Folly would have had to say about that?

ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM to his friend THOMAS MORE, health:

AS I was coming awhile since out of Italy for England, that I might not waste all that time I was to sit on horseback in foolish and illiterate fables, I chose rather one while to revolve with myself something of our common studies, and other while to enjoy the remembrance of my friends, of whom I left here some no less learned than pleasant. Among these you, my More, came first in my mind, whose memory, though absent yourself, gives me such delight in my absence, as when present with you I ever found in your company; than which, let me perish if in all my life I ever met with anything more delectable. And therefore, being satisfied that something was to be done, and that that time was no wise proper for any serious matter, I resolved to make some sport with the praise of folly. But who the devil put that in your head? you’ll say. The first thing was your surname of More, which comes so near the word Moriae (folly) as you are far from the thing. And that you are so, all the world will clear you. In the next place, I conceived this exercise of wit would not be least approved by you; inasmuch as you are wont to be delighted with such kind of mirth, that is to say, neither unlearned, if I am not mistaken, not altogether insipid, and in the whole course of your life have played the part of a Democritus. And though such is the excellence of your judgment that it was ever contrary to that of the people’s, yet such is your incredible affability and sweetness of temper that you both can and delight to carry yourself to all men a man of all hours. Wherefore you will not only with good will accept this small declamation, but take upon you the defense of it, for as much as being dedicated to you, it is now no longer mine but yours. But perhaps there will not be wanting some wranglers that may cavil and charge me, partly that these toys are lighter than may become a divine, and partly more biting than may beseem the modesty of a Christian, and consequently exclaim that I resemble the ancient comedy, or another Lucian, and snarl at everything. But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the argument may offend to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practiced even by great authors: when Homer, so many ages since, did the like with the battle of frogs and mice; Virgil, with the gnat and puddings; Ovid, with the nut; when Polycrates and his corrector Isocrates