SOURCE: Dünnhaupt, Gerhard. “Sebastian Brant: The Ship of Fools.” In The Renaissance and Reformation in Germany: An Introduction, edited by Gerhart Hoffmeister, pp. 69-81. New York: Ungar, 1977.

[In the following essay, Dünnhaupt offers an overview of the composition, influences, content, themes, and literary success of The Ship of Fools.]

No other work of German literature before Goethe can match the resounding popular success and lasting influence both at home and abroad of Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools—or, to give it its original name, Das Narrenschiff. The phenomenal speed with which this book became known and popular throughout Renaissance Europe is as astonishing as the variety of genres in which its influence may be felt to this day.

As early as 1494, the year of the first Basel printing, pirated versions of the High German original of The Ship of Fools appeared in Nürnberg, Reutlingen, Strassburg, and Augsburg. No less than five authorized editions were published in Basel within the first fifteen years, not counting further pirated printings. Several Low German and Latin translations began to make their appearance from 1497 onward. The Latin version by the humanist Jacob Locher—personally supervised by Brant—received high praise, quickly became a European best seller, and was subsequently reprinted and translated all over Western Europe. For the first time in history German letters had entered the mainstream of world literature. The earliest English adaptations, by Alexander Barclay (1508) and Henry Watson (1509), in turn sparked many further imitations and derivations that left their mark throughout English and American literature, the most recent being Katherine Anne Porter's novel and the film of the same title. Counting both German and foreign printings, the number of editions of The Ship of Fools works out to an average of one every six years over the past 480 years!

In Germany an entirely new literary genre evolved out of Brant's original concept: the “Narrenliteratur,” i.e., the personification of human follies. Many prominent authors of the age—from Geiler von Kaisersberg, Thomas Murner, Johannes Fischart, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Hans Sachs in the Renaissance to Moscherosch, Weise, and Grimmelshausen in the Baroque—were profoundly influenced by it. Indeed, the theme of human folly formed the very basis of many satirical publications produced during the century of religious strife and political upheaval that was to follow the Reformation. The Franciscan monk Thomas Murner wrote a widely read, vicious satirical attack on Martin Luther, entitled Of the Great Lutheran Fool (1522), in which Murner himself appears as an oversize tomcat (“Murr-Narr”) exorcising the follies of a gargantuan Luther figure. By way of the same author's earlier Narrenbeschwörung (Fools' Exorcism)—a book that incorporates sixty-nine of Brant's original woodcuts—the concept of the fool gradually gave way to personifications of human shortcomings as “devils.” Thus another new genre, “devils' literature,” came into being, in which formerly harmless follies, such as love of hunting or fashion, were personified and denounced as “hunting devil,” “fashion devil,” etc. Even a single chapter of The Ship of Fools (number 72), for which Brant had humorously invented a “Saint Grobian” (Saint Ruffian), started a minor literary genre all on its own: “grobianic literature,” a satirical approach to the teaching of social graces and table manners by means of negative examples.

Sebastian Brant himself laid no claim to originality. Far from it; standing, as he did, on the very threshold of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he proudly pointed out the many sources upon which he relied for his numerous exempla: the Old and New Testaments of the Bible; classical poets like Ovid, Vergil, and Juvenal; medieval proverbial wisdom; as well as his own legal specialty: canon law. The collecting of moral exempla for didactical purposes was a long-standing medieval custom, but to bring them together under the unifying theme of folly—through personification in individual fools—gave his work an epochal new character. To Brant's contemporaries The Ship of Fools represented a mirror of the world with all its errors and shortcomings, a total inventory of human follies. To the modern reader it affords a unique insight into the daily life, customs, manners, morals, and superstitions of central Europe in the early Renaissance.

As the first seventy-three chapters of The Ship of Fools uniformly number either thirty-four or ninety-four verses, they were once believed to have been written for publication as individual broadsheets similar to others Brant had produced in his youth. No evidence has ever been uncovered, however, to support such a theory. It is more likely that each poem was planned to fit exactly on two or four pages of the large-letter first edition. This plan, too, must have been abandoned after chapter 73, for at this point poems of varying length are introduced. Despite all efforts to prove the contrary, there appears to be no recognizable grouping of follies according to categories, nor are we able to detect any sequence or progression from relatively harmless transgressions to the seven mortal sins. No doubt Brant felt that such pedantry would have yielded tiresome results, for variety is what he sought to achieve, and the superb woodcuts assisted him in this aim. Usually they tend to illustrate one or several aspects of the particular folly under discussion. Often they refer to specific passages in the main poem, while the function of the motto verses is clearly to help the reader recognize the connection between picture and poem. The tripartite division of each chapter—woodcut, motto, poem—prefigures the basic concept of “emblematic poetry,” a genre that was to become immensely popular during the century following the publication of The Ship of Fools. In emblematics, however, the woodcut does not merely illustrate the poem or parts thereof, but often conveys a message of its own, so that all three parts are needed by the reader to comprehend and interpret the whole. Brant's poems, on the other hand, can easily stand on their own.

The work is introduced by the frame motif of the fools' ship, a symbol for the uncertainty of human endeavors, tossed about like a nutshell by the stormy seas of fate. After the introduction, however, the ship motif does not recur until chapter 48. Later on it is briefly mentioned a few more times, but not until the very end of the book (in chapters 103, 108, and 109) do we encounter the ship motif again. Brant's concept of human life as a voyage across uncharted seas could hardly have come at a more appropriate time, for those were the days of the great discoveries. Christopher Columbus had just returned from his first great overseas voyage, and none other than Sebastian Brant, together with his printer Bergmann von Olpe—who also collaborated with him on The Ship of Fools—had edited the famous Columbus letter to acquaint his countrymen with the earliest report of the newly discovered lands. An allusion in chapter 66,

They've found in Portugal since then
And in Hispania naked men,
And sparkling gold and islands too
Whereof no mortal ever knew.

(66, 53-56)¹

appears to be a direct reference to these new discoveries. Only eleven years after the first edition of Brant's book, in 1507, Martin Waldseemüller of Strassburg named the new continent “America.” And before another decade had passed, Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the castle church of Wittenberg. The sum total of knowledge that had been uncritically accepted for centuries was suddenly thrown open to question.

Sebastian Brant stood in the mainstream of this exciting intellectual development, and was able to count men like the artist Albrecht Dürer, Paracelsus, the famous physician-alchemist, and Erasmus among his personal friends. There were tremendous achievements in almost every field of the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. Brant's fools' ship omitted none of these disciplines, for he attacked folly wherever he found it. Hence it was not contradictory when he denounced the clergy for their immorality and greed while simultaneously urging his countrymen to cease their religious strife and return to the church. Nor did he hesitate to attack pseudoscholars, shoddy printers, and quacks, though he was of course not opposed to learning, publishing, or medicine per se. Brant condemned not the activity as such—merely its excess or abuse.

Several chapters of The Ship of Fools follow medieval tradition by providing exempla for the biblical commandments and the seven mortal sins. But it is predominately in the chapters dealing with lesser transgressions that we are able to gain an insight into the everyday world of Renaissance life and its customs, mores, and superstitions. We learn of corrupt priests selling fake relics to unsuspecting believers, of silly fashions for both men and women, of the nuisance created by nightly serenaders wooing their loved ones in the streets, and of profit-hungry advocates endlessly stretching out their court cases until both parties are bled dry. A colorful parade of whores and pimps, hypochondriacs and quacks, merchants, witches, and beggar-monks passes before our eyes, and we become curious to learn more of the contemporary educational, financial, and marital problems, about the games people played and the kind of food they ate, even the manner in which they consumed it. The variety of everyday situations satirized by Brant never ceases to surprise us—yet his Ship of Fools appears to have room for all of them.

Aside from the ship symbol there is a second motif that signifies the transience and ultimate futility of all earthly endeavor: the wheel of fortune. It is introduced in chapter 37, repeated in chapter 56, and frequently alluded to in other chapters as well. Similar to the ship, the wheel suggests uncertainty, but it also serves as a warning against attaching too much importance to one's worldly possessions and achievements, for the next turn of the wheel is bound to cause death and destruction. Here Brant's fools' parade closely approaches the medieval concept of the “dance of death.” In fact, Brant reserved the entire chapter 85 for the topic of death. We quickly realize that Brant's concept of death offers considerably less consolation than the accepted teachings of the Christian church:

To die and flow away we're bound
As water flows into the ground.

(85, 9-10)

Death is praised not as the glorious moment of entry into the Kingdom of Heaven but merely as the cessation of all sorrows and bitter experiences of earthly existence:

For many death has been a gain,
Since thus they're rid of grief and pain.

(85, 73-74)

Thus the hour of dying is dreaded, for it inevitably brings the horror of the final judgment:

Death is like a judge who hears no plea
Of any man for clemency.

(85, 83-84)

In this respect Brant's view of death almost coincides with that of the Plowman of Bohemia by Johannes of Teplá (1401),² who also sees it in all its finality rather than as a new beginning.

Despite Brant's somewhat unorthodox treatment of religious matters, he was a strict Roman Catholic who displayed no sympathy for the various reform movements that sprang up during his own lifetime. Nowhere is his ultraconservative attitude better illustrated than in the visionary, almost apocalyptic chapter 103, whose verses betray Brant's real fear of an ultimate victory for the Antichrist:

We're now approaching total night,
Such things have never happened yet,
The vessel sways, it may upset.

(103, 149-51)

Over and over he exhorted his readers not to listen to the temptors but to adhere firmly to the traditional ways. In view of the fact that Brant tended to side with the state in its conflicts of authority with the church, and considering his frequent reproofs of the clergy, one cannot help wondering whether his criticism did not further rather than impede the development of reform movements.

It thus appears that Brant tended to favor the maintenance of the status quo, for he warned his contemporaries of too rapid progress and looked toward the future with considerable apprehension. Did this make him a pessimist? Was it not indicative of a forward-looking Renaissance spirit to trust—as Brant did—in the power of education, to believe optimistically that man can be improved, and to employ recently invented printing techniques to convince his contemporaries? Why then the gloomy picture? The answer lies in Brant's didactic principle: to present his reader with a series of negative examples, to hold up a mirror to him so that he may recognize himself and mend his ways. Self-recognition, after all, is the first step toward improvement. Hence Brant felt obliged to dramatize the alternatives in order to emphasize the need for change. In this respect The Ship of Fools is at once conservative and progressive; although based on traditional medieval principles, it is nevertheless forward-looking and optimistic in spirit. Standing at the end of a dying world, it ushered in a new era. Only when we fully comprehend this fact can we begin to understand the enormous impact this work had upon Europe at the dawn of the northern Renaissance.

Notwithstanding the fact that The Ship of Fools was written in the vernacular, Brant's learned contemporaries were quick to recognize that it owed its satirical spirit to the classical tradition, to the great Roman examples of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, who are frequently quoted in the text. The Basel humanist Jacob Locher, author of the Latin version Stultifera navis (1497), made a strong point of aligning Brant's work with the classical tradition of his satire. Another contemporary, the great educator Jacob Wimpheling, lauded the work as the first German satire and demanded that it be made required reading in German schools. The learned Abbot Trithemius, author of the first German literary history, lavishly praised it as a “Divine Satire,” a fitting counterpart to Dante's “Divine Comedy.” Erasmus of Rotterdam, the greatest of all humanists, was profoundly influenced by this work. His own satirical Praise of Folly (1509) includes no fewer than twenty topics corresponding to chapters of Brant's book, and even some of its woodcuts—by the renowned Hans Holbein—are strongly reminiscent of The Ship of Fools. It has been argued that Brant's work lacks the unity of The Praise of Folly, but the inner unity of a satire does not rely on outward form as much as on the critical attitude of the satirist. Whether he chooses to deal with each exemplum in an individual poem, or to combine various exempla in a continuous prose piece, is merely a matter of artistic preference. The humanist Jodocus Badius, in his Stultiferae naviculae, seu scaphae, fatuarum mulierum (Ship of Foolish Women, Paris, 1500) characterized Brant's satirical manner as teaching the foolish, who are initially attracted by his humorous tone without realizing that they themselves are the butts of his satire—almost exactly the same characterization that the Roman poet Persius used for the satires of Horace. Brant's poetry thus stands as much in the Roman satirical tradition as does the prose of Erasmus. If the creation of works of art in the manner of the classics is the criterion by which we recognize a Renaissance artist, then Brant must be seen as a true humanist, like Erasmus. The difference in the satirical approach of the two writers is purely technical: while Brant exposed the foolishness of his characters by letting them utter their respective follies individually, Erasmus preferred to personify Folly—perhaps in analogy to Brant's personification of Wisdom in chapter 22—and ironically let her praise herself.

There is little doubt that the magnificent woodcuts contributed in large measure to the success of The Ship of Fools. This is strikingly demonstrated by the fact that even the foreign translations invariably used either the original woodcuts or faithful imitations of them. Moreover, books by other authors on similar topics, such as Thomas Murner's Fools' Exorcism, which were strongly inspired by Brant, also made use of many of his woodcuts, for no copyrights existed then to protect artists and writers. Although our information concerning the creation of the original woodcuts is somewhat scanty, it appears that Brant himself was directly involved in their planning and execution in the Basel workshop of his friend Bergmann von Olpe. From the textual evidence available it appears that specific instructions were issued by the poet to the artists, for in some cases the woodcuts illustrate scenes merely alluded to but not explicitly described in the text. Without direct supervision by the poet, no artist working independently could possibly have gained such insight from a mere reading of the poem. Though we do not know their identities, it is quite evident that artists of varying talents collaborated in the production of The Ship of Fools. Without difficulty we are able to recognize the hand of the so-called “Master of the Bergmann Shop” in many woodcuts of superior quality, while another group appears to have come from the hands of less skilled craftsmen. The superior woodcuts are almost invariably distinguished by finer lines, a great number of individual details, as well as a vastly improved sense of perspective. Often they are enhanced by a portion of background landscape: a castle on a hill, a village in the distance, or a glimpse into the town from an open window.

Who was the artist that created these masterly woodcuts? Various theories have been advanced to lift the veil hiding his identity. As there is evidence that young Albrecht Dürer served his apprenticeship in Basel between 1492 and 1494, strong arguments speak in his favor, and according to more recent comparative analyses of Dürer's work, his participation in The Ship of Fools may now be considered almost certain.

Sebastian Brant was the first German poet to achieve truly international renown and to leave a profound impression on the literature of other countries. Born in Strassburg in 1458, the son of a prosperous innkeeper and city alderman, he studied law at Basel, at that time one of Germany's most important universities and a major center of northern humanism. Here he received his doctorate in 1489, but continued to serve the university in various teaching capacities—including that of Dean of Law—for another decade. Aside from writing numerous legal treatises during those years, he also made a name for himself as a Latin poet and translator. Of more immediate consequence, as forerunners of The Ship of Fools, are his numerous pamphlets and broadsheets on a wide variety of subjects, bearing titles such as “Of the Thunderbolt Fallen in 1492 near Ensissheim,” “Of the Curious Sow at Landser in the Sundgau,” “Of the Two-headed Goose at Guggenheim,” or dealing with comets, floods, plagues, and similar unusual events. Since newspapers were not to appear until the next century, such broadsheets were the only available source of news. Like the chapters in The Ship of Fools, each consisted of three parts: a woodcut, an extended headline (in place of the later motto), and the actual news story in prose. Popular, too, were Brant's instruction manuals on social graces, as well as his collections of proverbs from the classics, all of which probably contributed indirectly to the shaping of The Ship of Fools.

Throughout his life, Brant remained a staunch supporter and fervent admirer of the German emperor Maximilian I. Thus, in 1499, when his adopted city of Basel decided to leave the empire to join the Swiss confederation, Brant immediately returned to his native Strassburg where he continued his legal career, to be rewarded subsequently for his loyalty with the post of Imperial Councillor. By now he was famous both as the poet of The Ship of Fools and as a legal authority, and his far-flung correspondence connected him with most of the great humanists of his day. After the death of his beloved hero Maximilian I in 1520, it was none other than Sebastian Brant who stood at the head of Strassburg's citizenry to pay homage to the old emperor's grandson, young Charles V. Only one year later, on May 10, 1521, Brant died in Strassburg. Though he had witnessed the beginnings of the Lutheran Reformation, he did not survive long enough to realize its full impact: the dreaded change of the old order that he unwittingly may have helped to bring about.

Notes

1. Translated by Edwin H. Zeydel, in an edition published 1944 by Columbia University Press (see bibliography). Quotations in this article are from that edition.

2. Translated by Alexander and Elizabeth Henderson, Ungar, 1966, under the name Johannes von Saaz.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

A. In German

Brant, Sebastian. Das Narrenschyff. Basel: Bergmann von Olpe, 1494; facsimile Franz Schulz, ed. Strassburg: Gesellschaft für elsässische Literatur, 1913. (First edition in any language.)

Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff. Friedrich Zarncke, ed. Leipzig, 1854; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms; and Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964. (The best annotated edition, without the woodcuts.)

Brant, Sebastian. Das Narrenschiff. Manfred Lemmer, ed. Neudrucke deutscher Literaturwerke, N.F. 5. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962. (Latest edition of Brant's original text.)

Brant, Sebastian. Das Narrenschiff. Transl. and ed. by H. A. Junghans. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964. (The best annotated translation into modern German, with all woodcuts. Paperback.)

B. In English

Barclay, Alexander. The Shyp of folys of the worlde … translated out of Laten, Frenche, and Doche into Englysse tonge. London: Richard Pynson, 1508; rpt. Edinburgh and London, 1874; with introduction by T. H. Jamieson.

Brant, Sebastian. The Ship of Fools. Transl. and ed. by Edwin H. Zeydel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1962. (The best annotated English translation, with all woodcuts. Paperback.)

Watson, Henry. The Shyppe of Fooles. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1509.

Secondary Sources

Böckmann, Paul. “Die Narrensatire als Weg der menschlichen Selbsterkenntnis bei Sebastian Brant.” In Böckmann, Formgeschichte der deutschen Dichtung, Hamburg, 1949, 227-239.

Bond, E. Warwick. “Brant's ‘Das Narrenschiff,’” in Bond, Studia Otiosa, Some Attempts in Criticism. London, 1938, 18-42.

Burckhardt, Daniel. Dürers Aufenthalt in Basel 1492-1494. München, 1892.

Claus, P. Rhythmik und Metrik in Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff. Quellen und Forschungen, 112. Strassburg, 1911.

Eberth, Hans Heinrich. Die Sprichwörter in Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff. Greifswalder Forschungen, 3. Dissertation Greifswald, 1933.

Fischer, C. B. “Several Allusions in Brant's Narrenschiff,” Modern Language Notes, 68 (1953), 395 ff.

Fraustadt, Fedor. Über das Verhältnis von Barclays Ship of Fools zur lateinischen, französischen und deutschen Quelle. Dissertation, Breslau, 1894.

Gaier, Ulrich. Studien zu Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff. Tübingen, 1966.

———. “Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff and the Humanists.” PMLA, 83 (1968), 266-270.

Genschmer, F. The Treatment of the Social Classes in the Satires of Brant, Murner, and Fischart. Dissertation, Urbana, Ill., 1934.

Gilbert, William. “Sebastian Brant: Conservative Humanist,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 46 (1955), 145-167.

Gruenter, Rainer. “Die ‘Narrheit’ in Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff,” Neophilologus, 43 (1953), 207 ff.

Herford, Charles H. Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, 1886.

Könneker, Barbara. Sebastian Brant: Das Narrenschiff. Interpretationen zum Deutschunterricht. München, 1966.

Learned, Henry Dexter. The Syntax of Brant's Narrenschiff. Philadelphia, 1917.

O'Connor, D. “Notes on the Influence of Brant's Narrenschiff outside Germany.” Modern Language Review, 20 (1925) 64 ff.

Ohse, Bernhard. Die Teufelliteratur zwischen Brant und Luther. Dissertation, Berlin, 1961.

Pompen, F. Aurelius. The English Versions of The Ship of Fools. London, 1925.

Schönfeld, Hermann. “Die kirchliche Satire und religiöse Weltanschauung in Brant's Narrenschiff und Erasmus' Narrenlob.” Modern Language Notes, 7 (1892), 78-92, 137-149, 345.

Sobel, E. “Sebastian Brant, Ovid, and Classical Allusions in the Narrenschiff.” University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 36 (1952), 429 ff.

Weisbach, Werner. Der Meister der Bergmannschen Offizin und Albrecht Dürers Beziehungen zur Baseler Buchillustration. In Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 6. Strassburg, 1896.

———. Die Baseler Buchillustration des XV. Jahrhunderts. In Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 8. Strassburg, 1896.

Winkler, F. Dürer und die Illustrationen zum Narrenschiff. In Forschungen zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 36. Berlin, 1951.

Wuttke, Dieter. “Sebastian Brants Verhältnis zu Wunderdeutung und Astrologie.” In Festschrift für Hugo Moser, W. Besch et al., eds. Berlin, 1974, 272-286.

Zeydel, Edwin H. “Notes on Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff.” Modern Language Notes, 58 (1943), 340-46.

———. “Sebastian Brant and the Discovery of America.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 42 (1943), 410-411.

———. “Some Literary Aspects of Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff.” Studies in Philology, 42 (1945), 21 ff.

———. Sebastian Brant. Twayne's World Authors Series, 13. New York, 1967.