Praise of Folly

In the tradition of fool literature produced by the ferment of new ideas that directly preceded the Protestant Reformation, Dutch priest, humanist, and scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) composed The Praise of Folly in 1509. Under Folly’s mask, Erasmus boldly attacked the abuses of church and state, and pilloried the faults of those he saw around him: idle superstition, pedantry, religious hypocrisy, and human foolishness. In this elegant translation from the Latin by John Wilson, the reader can savour a great work of satire, which, in the classical tradition, chastises human beings for their follies and excesses, not with a rod but with a smile.