SOURCE: Nordenfalk, Carl. “The Moral Issue in Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools.” In The Humanist as Citizen, edited by John Agresto and Peter Riesenberg, pp. 72-93. Chapel Hill, N.C.: National Humanities Center, 1981.

[In the following essay, Nordenfalk explores the liberal humanist ethic of The Ship of Fools, with its focus on the social consequences of human actions.]

It is most unusual for an author to make clear to his readers that he does not care to have his book sold. Yet this is what Sebastian Brant does at the end of his Narren-Schyff:

My fool's book, does it anger you?
I beg of you to pass it by
I ask no one to come and buy!(1)

As a matter of fact, when the book first appeared in Basel, on All Fools' Day 1494, it sold out almost immediately, and in less than a year the same thing happened to a second edition.² Even prior to the second edition, a number of pirated reprints had appeared elsewhere in Germany. Within a few years a Latin edition was published; the book was translated twice into French; and this was followed by two English and one Dutch paraphrases. In the history of the printed book no contemporary piece of writing had reaped a similar spontaneous success. It was the first known “best seller.”

There has been some speculation as to why the book appealed to people so much and so quickly.³ Some of the answers are fairly obvious. First, it was a typographically attractive volume, and its appearance established Brant's fellow student, Johann Bergmann von Olpe, a well-to-do Swiss cleric and a printer by avocation, as a leading representative in Basel of the flourishing craft of fine printing.⁴ It pleased the eye not only with clear and well-balanced type-setting, framed on both sides by rinceaux borders, but also with a wealth of illustrations, the majority of them by a rising star on the artistic firmament of Germany, the young Albrecht Dürer.⁵ Its more than a hundred woodcuts made The Ship of Fools as much a picture book as a piece of literature, and for that reason it appealed even to those bibliophiles—ridiculed by the author at the beginning of his poem—who collect books without caring to read them.⁶

In addition to that, the work was cleverly written in rhymed couplets, pleasing both by their easy-flowing rhythm and witty slogans. “The style,” says Edwin H. Zeydel, who has made an excellent modern translation of the poem into English, “is always clear, always animated and buoyant, and often balladesque.”⁷ The presentation is spiced throughout with proverbs, and the author has adapted a half-colloquial diction that goes well with them.⁸ Popular and learned at the same time, the book often applies to its subject matter a certain mocking tone of the sort cherished in students' farces, particularly in the retelling of classical history and mythology, a genre in which Brant himself makes quite a display. It functions like a sugar coating which makes the rather bitter moral pills of the songs easier to swallow. In spite of its serious errand, The Ship of Fools was light reading, and in those days people were not yet spoiled by such literature.

Quite likely the author's choice of title also contributed to the immediate success of the book. Das Narren-Schyff has a ring that still today easily impresses itself on one's memory. Its two component words—“ship” and “fool”—were equally effective. In the time of the great geographic discoveries, the big overseas galleys must have spoken to the popular imagination almost as much as spacecraft do to ours today. It is true that Brant himself took a more skeptical, even deprecatory, view of this sort of adventure. Although he is known to have collaborated with his publisher in printing Columbus's letter about the discovery of the New World,⁹ he considered it vain and useless for man to attempt exploration:

If round the earth a man can fare,
What men live here, what men live there,
If underneath our feet below
Men walk the nether earth or no,
And how they hold their ground down there
That they fall not into the air …(10)

In chapter 34 he again satirizes useless traveling:

Fools often travel very far
Yet never learn just where they are.(11)

The notion of the fool is, as we all know, an infallible source of fun, innocent or malicious.¹² Everybody enjoys hearing about someone else's slips and foibles, with little thought that he, too, might make similar mistakes. The latter consideration is, in fact, one of Brant's main points, and he does not fail to apply it even to himself:

I know it, I confess to God
Of folly I was never free
I have joined the fool's fraternity.
I pull the cap which I would doff
Yet my fool's cap will not come off …(13)

By the time Brant wrote his book, the fool had long since become a time-honored figure, with an ancestry reaching back into the Old Testament and Greek philosophy.¹⁴ In the Middle Ages, however, he took a more specific shape in the institution of the professional fool, the court jester and his amateur stand-ins, the Shrovetide revelers. Their fancy uniform, the main part of which was a cap with donkey's ears, ending in bells and with a further row of bells attached to the hood like a coxcomb, is how the fools are represented throughout the illustrations in Brant's poem, whatever their status in real life. High and low, young and old, even women (who were not supposed to take part in the Shrovetide pranks) appear in the woodcuts wearing this outfit.¹⁵

By applying the notion of foolishness to all sorts of people, Brant has been able to draw a broad panorama of the society of his own time, in much the same way as, in another century, the caricaturist Daumier jested his fellow citizen. The historian who wants to know what life was like in those days has much to learn from Brant's poem and from the illustrations accompanying it. City life and rural conditions, ecclesiastical and secular customs, labor and leisure time pass in review, rendering with a keen eye the debility of all human striving. As a professor utriusque iuris Brant was well acquainted with the various misdemeanors registered in the normative textbooks of canon and civil law. The thirty-six Causae of the Decretum Gratiani discuss the same number of typical departures from the ordinances of the ecclesiastical legislation, and Brant's The Ship of Fools actually resembles this treatise in the not very systematic order in which both present the different cases.¹⁶ We are constantly thrown from one type of fool to another with little connection between them. The review of human weaknesses seems inexhaustible in its motley variety. “The reader wonders,” as Richard Newald wrote, “that after the twentieth chapter the book still goes on, and when he comes to the end, he wonders that it ceases.”¹⁷ The very artlessness of the composition has a purpose. It enables Brant to give the impression that he covers everything in need of scrutiny:

For fools a mirror shall it be
Where each his counterfeit may see,

he says in the prologue.¹⁸ It all made the book captivating in the same way as a good sermon. In fact, The Ship of Fools became the text for a hundred and forty-two sermons preached in 1498-99 by Johannes Geiler von Kaisersberg from his pulpit in the Strasbourg Cathedral, an attention rarely given by an ecclesiastic to a piece of secular literature.¹⁹ Indeed, Geiler's sermons, when printed in 1513, had even greater reverberations in pre-Protestant Germany than the original text on which they were based.

Brant's own influence on the developments that were to result in Luther's open revolt against the Roman church was moderate. As literature, The Ship of Fools had a quality characteristic of most best sellers at all times: its outlook was neither too old-fashioned nor too modern. As a humanist, Brant belonged among the progressive writers of his time, but he was at the same time deeply committed to tradition. His book has been called “a ship passing into modern times with its sails filled by the last wind of the Middle Ages,”²⁰ and it would have been a paradox were this not the way one era quite often develops into another. Several chapters have an outspoken, critical tang, such as the one entitled “Of the Decline of the Faith,” in which Brant takes the Western powers to task for not stopping the advance of the Turks (ch. 99). But mostly his criticism of the grievances of his time was not stringent enough to make those hit by it feel seriously smitten. In his own eyes Brant was a valiant combatant of hypocrisy and deceit, wherever they could be detected:

Full often have I been maligned
Because this ship I have designed …
But I would let them freeze forsooth
Ere saying anything but truth.(21)

Nevertheless, he is careful not to point his satire too openly toward any specific institution or party in power. Here and there he pleads for ecclesiastical or social reforms, but only indirectly and as a faithful son of the church and a loyal supporter of the Holy German Empire. In chapter 91, “Of Prattling in Church,” for instance, he avoids mentioning the priests, nor does he in chapter 30, “Of too many benefices,” blame the widespread misuse of pluralities on the pope.²²

It is exactly by his allegiance to the Christian dogma that Brant fails to draw the full consequences of his humanist conception of man's mission on earth. In his time, two different systems of ethics were facing each other: the old theocratic system that put every act in relation to afterlife; and the pragmatic view that preferred to see human behavior in relation to prevalent social conditions and to how it could help each individual overcome his weaknesses. The former drew in no uncertain terms a fixed borderline between good and evil, reflecting the dualistic conception of the world underlying all religions, including Christianity. Man was the eternally disputed bone of contention between God and the devil. The chances of the latter were great from the beginning because of original sin. Basically, every human being was a sinner, and his sinfulness manifested itself most flagrantly through the seven deadly sins: pride, avarice, wrath, envy, greed, lechery, and sloth.²³ It did not matter what place you had on the social scale, the devil was always ready to throw your soul into perdition. In this fatal situation, man could hope for salvation only by being a faithful son or daughter of the church and by the infinite grace of Christ, who had taken all the sins of mankind on himself by his death on the cross.

The pragmatic view of ethics, on the other hand, did not admit so univocal a belief. The humanist idea of the dignity of man gave the conflict a different dimension.²⁴ The more manageable antagonism was that between wisdom and its opposite, human folly. Long before the rise of Christianity, wisdom had been featured as the supreme value by the pagan philosophers, and the humanists professed the same doctrine. Wisdom had, moreover, a less high-flown side—that practical wisdom for which another name was prudence and which aimed at helping man conduct his life to the benefit both of himself and his fellow beings. If you behaved like a fool, you deserved to be castigated, rather than punished. And there was for every fool a time-honored medicine, written over the entrance to the temple of Apollo in Delphi: γνω̑θι sεατόν: know yourself!

The pragmatic notion of folly retained some relevance all through the Middle Ages. As early as the twelfth century, an English author, Nigellus, called Wireker, had in a Speculum stultorum ridiculed the monks and clerics who suffered from the desire to move around from one place to another.²⁵ But it was mainly at the very end of the medieval period that the idea of man's inveterate foolishness gained momentum in the thinking and writing of the educators and the pamphleteers, and in no other work with more imagination and consequence than in Brant's Narren-Schyff.²⁶

Generally speaking, Brant sided with the more liberal ethics of the humanists by replacing the sinner with the fool. More than anything else, this change of perspective must have been the kindling spark that put him to work and inspired his rhyming effusions. Notwithstanding the verses quoted at the beginning of this essay, he did want to reach out to his fellow citizens and make them realize their foolishness, not only through criticism, but also through good advice. In preaching the virtue of prudence, some of his poems even profess a moral below the standard of true humanism. The explorer's bold search to widen knowledge of the earth had, as already mentioned, little to recommend itself in his eyes. On the contrary, one chapter professes the belief, certainly not heroic at all, that one should not take any risks. In defiance of the classical motto, Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas, he recommends, “Better keep away!”

'Tis better never to attempt
Than end with losses and contempt.(27)

Chapter 58 is about the foolishness “Of forgetting oneself.” He is a fool, the author says, “who thinks of others, not of himself,” who tries to

quench a neighbor's blazing fire
While flames around his barn mount higher.

For this frankly egotistical wisdom Brant refers with approval to a classical playwright:

Terence was right when once he stated
‘I am nearest to myself related.’(28)

Openness and trust in dealing with friends and neighbors would seem to be a good humanistic rule of life, but Brant in chapter 19, “Of idle talk,” recommends instead a cleverly reckoned reticence.²⁹ His attitude toward “outlandish fools” (ch. 98), nonbelievers, mad women, suicides, panderers, and so on—“so many worthless folk”—is not very enlightened either:

They can't be cured howe'er we try
I'll keep my peace and pass them by.(30)

He is, furthermore, suspicious of cheating beggars, of loquacious and boozing messengers (ch. 80), of lawyers who either are ignorant (ch. 2) or who blindfold justice (ch. 71), of physicians who are quacks (ch. 55), and of journeymen who never properly learned their craft (ch. 48). He believes deceit is typical of the relations of servants to their masters (“Of cooks and waiters,” ch. 81). Brant also reminds his readers of the many ways a woman can make a man unhappy—by committing adultery, by being quarrelsome and prone to gossip, as well as through the inborn vanity of the feminine sex (chs. 32, 33, 64, and 93).³¹

To a considerable degree, Brant's ethics focus on the social consequences of human actions and people's unwillingness to foresee them. If you are old, do not divide your possessions among your children before you die; they will only make bad use of them and show you no gratitude (ch. 5). It is pure folly to start building a house without calculating the costs (ch. 15), or to fail to provide for future needs, so that:

In winter you'll have naught to eat
And like the bear lick hands and feet.(32)

[ch. 70]

Foolish behavior brings on its revenge automatically. Who “aims at birds' nests very high” is likely to tumble head first to the ground (ch. 36). It is in the nature of the fool to “want things that do more harm than good” (“Of useless wishing,” ch. 26). In fact,

Many pray for things so bad
'Twould irk them if those things they had.(33)

[ch. 45]

This applies particularly to those who wish for a “protracted life”:

Who live too long, have great distress
Accursed misfortunes them oppress.

[ch. 26]

With merciless realism Brant describes their countenance:

They are pale, misshapen, sick, and cold,
Hollow their cheeks, their skin like crepe
As though their mother'd been an ape.(34)

[ch. 26]

Only the fool puts his faith in future happiness. The wheel of fortune keeps turning, and he who rises today will fall tomorrow (chs. 37 and 56). Some fools even invite misfortune by jumping with open eyes into perdition, as Empedokles did at Etna (ch. 45). Even without the chastisement of bad luck, the constantly fortunate person is also a fool:

No greater fool was ever made
Than one whose luck has never strayed.(35)

[ch. 23]

Others take all the cares of mankind on their backs, for no good reason, and are not far from drooping beneath the burden; they are

Fools who fret and falter
Because of things they cannot alter.(36)

[ch. 24]

In this manner, a gallery of human foibles is marshaled for scrutiny without any one of them properly qualifying as a sin.³⁷ But Brant does not reserve the notion of folly to these alone. Alternating with such minor manifestations of foolishness as bad manners at table (ch. 110a) and field sports (ch. 74) are quite as many faults of a more grave nature, and those committing them are likewise called fools. Even the seven deadly sins are put under the same denominator. They are, in fact, referred to in no less than twenty different chapters. Some are more precisely divided into separate variants, pride including self-complacency, vainglory, vanity, and boasting, lechery including carnal love, adultery, and obscene language.³⁸ Different acts of dishonesty, deceit, and uncharitableness are also featured in a great many chapters as foolishness only, to mention only usury (ch. 93), ingratitude toward benefactors (ch. 59), backbiting (ch. 7), and slander (ch. 101).

Thus, the sins, even the capital ones, may seem to be reduced to mere follies. But Brant's real conviction is the other way around. To him all fools are caught in the devil's toils, and this explains why matters that might be thought of at most as being heedless are judged severely. Although certainly not intended, a smile is evoked when men's new custom of shaving their faces is called a “quite disgraceful thing” (ch. 4)³⁹ or when Brant denounces the modern fashion of wearing coats so short “that almost the navel shows.”⁴⁰ In fact, everyone who even approves of such costumes is a sinner:

Woe's every man who rouses shame
Woe's him too who condones such sin
The wages will be paid to him.(41)

[ch. 4]

Dancing, naturally, is condemned for the same reasons (ch. 61). The devil invented it, and therefore “dance and sin are one in kind.” At Kermess—“where the fun is shared by priests and laity”—

They swing their partners in the breeze
Till girls' bare legs high up one sees.(42)

At night the peace is disturbed by serenading, another outrageous custom to which Brant devotes a chapter (ch. 62). Gambling, too, is a dreadful sin, particularly when exercised even by women (ch. 77):

The distaff they should tend and wet
And gamble not with men and bet.(43)

It all goes to show that Brant, in favoring the epithet of folly rather than that of sin, did not really intend to question the old theocratic order.⁴⁴ In full consistency with this outlook, we find among the passengers on Brant's The Ship of Fools quite a number whose unpardonable fault is thinking lightly of heavenly things, including the sacred service.⁴⁵ (Not just by chance was the publisher of the book, Johann Bergmann von Olpe, a Swiss archdeacon.) A chapter called “Noise in Church” (ch. 44) castigates men who come to mass bringing dogs and falcons, in the hope of seeing some attractive Lady Kriemheld. Equally reprehensible are failure to observe the holy days (ch. 95), chatting during service, and leaving immediately after it is over (ch. 91). But one may show contempt of Holy Writ in such other ways as placing credit in old wives' tales and reporting unattested miracles (ch. 11).⁴⁶ In these cases Brant speaks as an enlightened Christian and a humanist at the same time.

In applying the term “fool” to those who lack reverence for the ecclesiastical establishment, Brant reverts to the use of the word in the Old Testament that is equal in tenor to the term “godless,” and his condemnation of these people resembles the austerity of the revenging God of the Israelites. There is no more evident sign of foolishness, he says, than to rely on the presumption of God's eternal mercy; people who read the Bible have not always seemed to have noted

That punishment is always stated
And retributions unabated.(47)

[ch. 14]

And in “Of torture and punishment by God” (ch. 88), the Lord himself speaks straight to the point:

“If my command you will not hear
I'll send you plague and dread and fear
Drought, hunger, pestilence and war,
Heat, frost, cold, hail, and thunder's roar
And make it worse from day to day
And from your prayers turn away.”(48)

It is characteristic of all fools that they take God's admonitions lightly:

Though knowing well that they must die
Where, when and how no one can know
Till through the mouth the soul will go
But that his soul to hell will fare
No one believes until it's there.(49)

[ch. 29]

The ultimate threat is the day of the Last Judgment, which will be preceded by the coming of the arch-fool, Antichrist.⁵⁰ To his appearance in the fullness of time, Brant has devoted one of his double-length chapters (ch. 103). It is headed by an illustration larger than the normal size. The ship of orthodoxy has capsized. On top of the bulging hull, Antichrist is enthroned like God on his rainbow. He is a beautiful young man with a purse in one hand and a scourge in the other. To deceive his followers, he has laid off his fool's cap, which is resting beside him. He seems to enjoy having a huge devil puffing with a bellows into his ear. Some drowning fools are seen floating around in the water among useless books. In smaller vessels left and right, heretics come alongside the wreck to attack it and to help it perish. Only a few faithful in the foreground are rescued. Standing on a rock, St. Peter pulls ashore a boat with a handful redeemed, using his attribute, an enormous key. One of the saved, who may well be the author, turns toward St. Peter with folded hands. Of all the illustrations in The Ship of Fools, this one most clearly reveals the early mastership of Dürer and gives a premonition of the intense imagery characteristic of his first truly great work, the Apocalypse.

One may rightly wonder why an author as firmly rooted in the biblical belief that “many are called but few chosen” should have cared at all for the futility of people's strivings on earth. The answer is that Brant kept a stealthy affection for the fools he so severely condemns. Even the Lord loveth whom he chasteneth. Most of Brant's moral maxims are commonplaces, but the way he exemplified them has the freshness of the new sense of reality characteristic of the art of his days. Human folly was a manifestation of life itself in its misery and grandeur, and Brant took an obvious delight in depicting it in significant details. An example is chapter 75, “Of bad marksmen.” The scene is a shooting range along a river, and the description of the way an archery competition happens leaves no doubt that Brant himself must have more than once tried his luck at it and knew all the excuses one could plead for missing the target:

Some men will shoot too high and low
They break the string or bolt or bow
In bending bows some make a slip
Or on the bolt they lose their grip
Too soon the arrow's oft released
Because the bowstring is overgreased.(51)

Similarly, the long chapter about gambling (ch. 77) makes one suspect that Brant was not unfamiliar with that sinful pastime either. His depiction of the next day's hangover after a night passed at the gambling table is exceptionally droll. In reading such passages, one has the feeling that Brant's keen eye for the characteristics of bourgeois life more than any missionary zest stimulated his writing talent. As so often is true in art and literature, the moralizing aspect functioned as a license for dealing freely with a subject matter that had not yet become acceptable in its own right.

Not that Brant would be a hypocrite to preach again and again the sinners' risk of being eternally condemned; he certainly believed in hell as seriously as any medieval domesday preacher. His was still the philosophy that taught the men of the Middle Ages “that they lived in a true middle age between the revelation of God's plan for man and the final execution of His judgment,” to quote one of Charles Frankel's striking formulations.⁵² But he could not help also looking with fascination at the people floundering in the devil's snares, and whereas the descriptions in the text only partially visualize their countenance and behavior, the illustrations, in the composition of which Brant no doubt took a part, come to the readers' aid congenially. Two souls were housed in Brant's breast, and in different ways they made his Ship of Fools steer its zigzag course toward the phantasmagoria of the land of Narragonia.

Notes

1. Ch. 110, vv. 22-24, here quoted from Edwin E. Zeydel, The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, translated into rhymed couplets, with introduction and commentary, Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 36 (New York: Columbia, 1944), p. 358. In the original, here and in the following notes quoted from the still normative edition by Fr. Zarncke (Leipzig, 1854), the verses run:

   Wem nit gefält disz narrenbuch
   Der mag wol lossen, das es louff
   Ich bitt keynen, das er es kouff.

2. For a comprehensive account of the different editions see Zeydel, The Ship of Fools, pp. 21f.; also Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1930), pp. 5041f.

3. For a summing up see Barbara Könniker, Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, Interpretationen zum Deutschunterricht, ed. R. Hirschenauer and A. Weber (Munich: Oldenbourg 1966), pp. 8f., with bibliography.

4. Brant's Narren-Schyff was probably the first product of Bergmann's printing office in Basel, which in spite of its success lasted only a few years. See Ferdinand Geldner, Die deutschen Inkunabeldrucker (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1968), 1:128, and Horst Kunze, Geschichte der Buchillustration in Deutschland. Das 15. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Verlag für Buch and Bibliothekswesen, 1975), pp. 390f.

5. Daniel Burckhardt, Albrecht Dürer's Aufenthalt in Basel, 1492-1494 (Munich, 1892), was the first to ascribe the best woodcuts to Dürer. Rejected by some scholars, his assumption has been vindicated by Friedrich Winkler, Dürer und die Illustrationen zum Narrenschiff, Forschungen zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 36 (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft, 1951), so convincingly that a lingering hesitation among non-art historians seems unreasonable.

6. Although Lukianos is usually not mentioned among the classical authors with whom Brant was familiar, it is hard to believe that the first chapter of The Ship of Fools entitled “Of Useless Books” should have been written without knowledge of Lukianos's satire on “The Ignorant Book-Collector” (A. M. Harmon, trans., Lucian, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921], 3:173f.). It is not the only parallel. Like Brant, Lukianos also turns against slanderers (Loeb, 3:320f.), astrologers (Loeb, 5:348f.), and dancing (Loeb, 5:210f.).

7. Zeydel, The Ship of Fools, p. 17.

8. Zeydel rightly praises Brant's gift for coining pithy compound words and striking fancy names, such as Klosterkatz (“cloistercat”), Sankt Grobian (“St. Ruffian”), Dr. Griff (“Dr. Grab-it”), Narragonia (from Narr and Aragonien).

9. Edwin H. Zeydel, “Sebastian Brant and the Discovery of America,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 42 (1943): 410-11.

10. Ch. 66, vv. 11-17:

    Ob man hab umb die gantz welt fur
    Was volcks wone under yeder schnur
    Ob under unsern füssen lüt
    Ouch sygen, oder do so nüt
    Und wie sie sich enthaltten uff
    Das sie nit fallen jnn den lufft.

    It has often been pointed out that in spite of its title, the ship topos plays on the whole only a minor part in the book. In the first half it hardly appears, and when, in the second half and in the prologue (which, although referred to in chapter 64, must have been written after the book was already more or less finished in a draft), the ship is mentioned more frequently, it is still only used as a setting for a few fools. This is not astonishing, however, because Brant describes and satirizes the human fools one by one, and a ship provides a natural stage for a lot of passengers. For the same reason, there are few ships included in the illustrations, which instead depict the fools indoors, on a street, or in a landscape. Apart from the frontispiece woodcuts that do respond to the title of the book, one waits until chapter 48 before finding any ships among the illustrations at all. After another twenty-five chapters, the next ship is sighted, at the beginning of chapter 72, where a ship in the middle ground is tied to the tail of a sow in the foreground—still a Medieval space construction. Only at the end, preceding chapter 108, is there a ship, overcrowded with happy and less happy fools on their trip to Narragonia; whether a repetition of the second frontispiece woodcut, or the other way round, is hard to decide. There is also one of a fool alone in a vessel about to be wrecked (chapter 109). The true meaning of the title is that the book itself is the ship, and all the fools together are its passengers. This being so, it is hard to say whether the idea of a shipload of fools originated with Brant himself or with the illustrator who first drew them onboard a vessel.

11. Ch. 34, vv. 11-12:

    Eyn narr ist wer viel land durchfert
    Und wenig kunst, noch tugend lert.

12. The supreme testimony of this is Erasmus's Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium), where Folly begins her oration by praising her divine powers to “gladden the hearts of gods and men” (quoted from the translation by Betty Radice [Middlesex, England: Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1971], p. 63).

13. Ch. 111, vv. 71-76:

    Ich kenn das, und vergych es gott
    Das ich vil dorheit hab gethon
    Und doch jm narrenorden gon
    Wie vast ich am der kappen schütt,
    Will sie mich doch gantz lossen nytt

    Similarly, ch. 110, vv. 27-28.

14. Karl Friedrich Flögel, Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen, ed. Friedrich Ebeling, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Barsdorf, 1888); O. Monkemöller, Narren und Toren in Satire: Sprichwort und Humor (Leipzig, 1912); Barbara Swain, Fools and Follies (New York: Columbia, 1932); Enid Welsford, The Fool (London: Faber & Faber, 1935); Barbara Könniker, Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im Zeitalter des Humanismus (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1966).

15. Most conspicuous is the representation of the Five Foolish Virgins at the beginning of chapter 105.

16. On Gratian's Decretum see Anthony Melnikas, The Corpus of the Miniatures in the Manuscripts of the Decretum Gratiani, Studia Gratiana, 16-18 (Rome: Studia Gratiana, 1975), of which there is a critical review in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 43 (1980): 318-32.

17. Richard Newald, Elsässische Charakterköpfe aus dem Zeitalter des Humanismus (Kolmar, n.d.), p. 96.

18. Vv. 30-31:

    Den narrenspiegel ich disz nenn
    In dem ein yeder narr sich kenn

    The fifteenth-century sources of Brant's book have been well brought to light by Hellmut Rosenfeld, “Sebastian Brants ‘Narrenschiff’ und die Tradition der Ständessatire, Narrenbilderbogen und Flugblätter des 15. Jahrhunderts,” Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1965): 242-48.

19. Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg, Ausgewählte Schriften, in freier Bearbeitung von Ph. de Lorenzi, 2 (Trier: E. Groppe, 1883). On Geiler see also the article by D. Wuttke in Neue Deutsche Biographie 6 (1964): 18.

20. Newald, Elsässische Charakterköpfe, p. 92.

21. Ch. 104, vv. 50-51 and 56-57:

    Ich bin gar offt gerennet an
    Wile ich disz schiff gezymberet han
    Aber ich liesz sie alle erfryeren
    Das ich anders dann worheyt seyt

22. See Aurelius Pompen, The English Versions of the “Ship of Fools” (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1925), p. 122, and the pertinent remarks on Brant's character by Newald, Elsässische Charakterköpfe, pp. 89f.

23. Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952).

24. The topic is too extensive to be covered by any survey. See, however, Hans Heinrich Schmid, Wesen und Geschichte der Weisheit (Berlin, 1966), and Carl August Emge, Der Weise (Erfahrung und Denken, 22) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1967).

25. A. Boutemy, Nigellus de Longchamp, dit Wireker Université libre de Bruxelles, Traveaux, t. 16 (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1959), and Speculum stultorum, with Introduction and Notes by John H. Mozley and Robert R. Raymo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass: Nigellus Wireker's Speculum Stultorum, trans. Graydon W. Regenos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959). For a summary of its content, see Max Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur im Mittelalter (Munich: Beck, 1923), 3:810.

26. R. Gruenter, “Die ‘Narrheit’ in Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff,” Neophilologus 43 (1959): 207f.; Ulrich Gaier, Studien zu Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966); Barbara Könniker, Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im Zeitalter des Humanismus (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1966); and Joel Lefebure, Les fols et la folie: Etude sur les genres du comique et la creature littéraire en Allemagne pendant la Renaissance (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968).

27. Ch. 15, vv. 29-30:

    Vil weger ist nüt understan
    Dann mit schad, schend, gespöt ablan

28. Vv. 11-12:

    Als ouch Terencius vermant
    Ich bin mir aller nähst verwant

    The reference is to Terence's Andriae, 4.1.12: proximus sum egomet mihi.

29. Vv. 10-20:

    Ich halt nit für eyn wysen man
    Wer nit syn anschlag bergen kan

    Same in ch. 39, “Of open plans”:

    That person is in folly dyed
    who confidential plans can't hide.

30. Vv. 5-6:

    Und sint zu bringen nit dar von
    Will ich still schwygend für sie gon.

31. Ever since Juvenal's sixth satire, the vices of women have been a favorite subject for (male) satirists, as pointed out by Pompen, English Versions of the “Ship of Fools,” pp. 178-87. The fools on board Brant's ship are with few exceptions all male; in the prologue, the author excuses himself for not having paid more attention to the women. Brant's French translator, the Lyonese humanist Josse Badius, considered this an important gap and thus wrote a supplement of his own, called La nef des folles, in which the foolish women are distributed among five ships according to the five senses. See Paul Renouard, Bibliographie des impressions et des oeuvres de Josse Badius Ascensius, imprimeur et humaniste, 1462-1535 (Paris, 1908; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1963), 1:159f., and Anatole Claudin, Histoire de l'imprimerie en France aus XV^e et XVI^e siècle (Paris: Impr. nationale 1900-1914), 2:128f. I intend to come back to this subject in a book on Art and the Five Senses, on which I had the privilege of working as a fellow of the National Humanities Center.

32. The translation by Zeydel is a condensation of vv. 19-23:

    musz durch den Winter sich
    Behelffen ettwan schlähteklich
    Und an den dopen sugen hert
    Bisz er des hungers sich erwert

33. Vv. 31-32:

    Mancher jm gbett von gott begert
    Im wer leid, das er wurd gewert

34. Vv. 18-20:

    Sint sie doch bleich, sieck, ungestalt
    Ihr backen und hüt sind so lär
    Als ob eyn aff jr muter wär.

35. Vv. 33-34:

    Denn grosser narren wurden nye
    Dann die allzyt glück hatten hye

36. Vv. 33-34:

    Der ist eyn narr der sorgt all tag
    Das er doch nit gewenden mag

37. This is often pointed out in the literature about The Ship of Fools, for example, by Charles Schmidt, Histoire litteraire de l'Alsace (Paris, 1879; repr. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graft, 1966), 1:201.

38. I am here following the analysis of Brant's text by F. A. Pompen, English Versions of the “Ship of Fools,” pp. 20f.

39. Brant may have changed his mind in this matter—he is shown clean-shaven on the woodcut at the beginning of his Nova Carmina (Basel, 1498), reprod. in Jaro Springer, Sebastian Brants Bildnisse, Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 87 (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1907), p. 15, and also in some later portraits, such as that by Hans Burgkmayr of 1508 in the Karlsruhe Kunsthalle, overlooked by Springer.

40. Vv. 25-26:

    Kurz schändlich und beschrotten röck
    Das einer kum den nabel bdöck.

41. Vv. 32-34:

    We dem der ursach gibt zu schand
    We dem ouch der solch schand nit strofft
    Im wurt zu lon das er nit hofft.

42. Vv. 23-24:

    Do loufft man, und würfft umbher eyn
    Das man hoch sieht die blosszen beyn

43. Vv. 37-38:

    Sie soltten an der kunckel läcken
    und nit jm spyel byn mannen stäcken.

44. As documented by W. Gilbert, “Sebastian Brant, Conservative Humanist,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 9 (1955): 154f., Brant in his Latin poetry appears as a fervent devotee of the Virgin and of both greater and smaller saints, particularly St. Onophrius, the hermit. He may even have considered for a time becoming a hermit himself.

45. Most sharply in chapters 86 and 87 about “Despising God” and “On Blasphemy of God,” one illustrated by a fool pulling Christ's beard, the other by a fool attacking the crucified Christ with a trident.

46. In some of his Latin poems Brant featured, however, certain saints whose claim to veneration does not seem too well established, such as Joachim, the husband of St. Anne, and one of St. Ursula's eleven thousand virgins who escaped the martyrdom of her companions by falling sick on the way near Basel, where she was reported to have been buried (Gilbert, “Sebastian Brant,” pp. 149-50).

47. Vv. 14-16:

    Dar usz er doch nit mercken will
    Das allenthalb die stroff darnach
    Geschrieben stat, mit plag und rach.

48. Vv. 17-22:

    Wann jr nit haltten myn gebot
    Will ich uch geben plag und dot
    Kryeg, hunger, pestilentz, und dür,
    Hytz, ryff, kelt, hagel, tunders für
    Und meren das, von tag zu tag
    Und nit erhören bätt noch klag.

49. Vv. 18-22:

    Und weisz doch das er sterben musz
    Wo, wenn und wie, ist jm nit kundt
    Bisz das die sel fert usz dem mundt
    Doch glabut er nit das syg eyn hell
    Bisz er hin jn kumbt uber die schwell.

50. Hans Preuss, Die Vorstellungen vom Antichrist im späten Mittelalter (Leipzig: Deichert, 1906), and Will-Erich Peuckert, Die gross Wende, das Apokalyptische Saeculum und Luther (Hamburg: Claasen & Govertz, 1948), provide the proper background for understanding this particular chapter in Brant's The Ship of Fools.

51. Vv. 12-17:

    Vil sint die schyessen über usz
    Eym bricht der bogen, senw, und nusz
    Der dut am anschlag manchen schlypf
    Dem ist verruckt stul oder schypf
    Dem losszt das armbrust, so ers rürt
    Das schafft der wyndfat ist geschmyert.

52. The Case for Modern Man (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 13.