SOURCE: Wilkie, J. R. “Brant and The Ship of Fools: An Introduction.” University of Leeds Review 16 (1973): 212-33.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1973, Wilkie presents the historical context in which Brant lived and wrote, describes the contents of The Ship of Fools, reviews the critical approaches that have been taken to the poem, and offers his own views on its importance.]

It is a great pleasure and honour for me to have in my audience tonight his Excellency the Ambassador of the German Federal Republic. I welcome him and his party on behalf of the German Department—and hasten to assure him that my title, ‘Brant and The Ship of Fools’, has no topical reference. My Brant lived in the fifteenth century … and as for shiploads of fools, these are universal and we have no need to cross the North Sea to find them. I leave each of you to decide which of our fellow-countrymen might be offered an assisted passage on a voyage of that kind …

On this thirty-sixth day of our membership of the EEC I further hasten to reassure you all—or disappoint you—by saying that my title is not a disguise for a subject like ‘The Future of German Studies’ or ‘German Studies and the Common Market’. These highly technical matters are best discussed in the decent privacy of departmental meetings or developments committees. I really am going to talk about the fifteenth century, which is one of my own fields of study. So I now invite you to come there with me.

The time is the Shrovetide festival of the year 1494 and the place is the city of Basel, then a free city of the Holy Roman Empire but soon to join the Swiss Confederation, a city with a young and vigorous university and a growing reputation as a centre for the new art of printing. Shrovetide is the season when, in continental countries, fools traditionally come into their own and are allowed to say and do outrageous things with impunity; and so the poem which appeared in Basel at Shrovetide 1494 was very appropriate. It was called Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) and was in essence an elaborate survey of the shortcomings of contemporary society, presented in the guise of a shipload of fools setting sail for Narragonia. (Narr is one of the German words for ‘fool’; hence Narrheit ‘folly’, Narrenschiff ‘Ship of Fools’, Narragonien ‘Land of Fools, Fool's Paradise’.) The poem at once became the greatest publishing success of its age and was soon probably the best known book in Western Europe.

The author of the Narrenschiff was no fool, but a highly intelligent and very learned professor of law at the university, a man of thirty-seven, a much admired teacher both in his own faculty and in the Faculty of Arts, where he lectured from time to time on poetry (meaning Latin poetry), and already an author and man of letters of considerable stature. His portrait was painted by Hans Burgkmair about 1508, when Brant was about fifty, i.e. some fourteen years after the Narrenschiff. He had been born in the other great free city of the Franco-German frontier region, Strassburg, where his father was host of the Golden Lion Inn—perhaps not a bad place for the boyhood of one who was to survey the weaknesses of his fellow men. He had a good education in Strassburg and then matriculated in Basel in 1475.

The university of Basel had been founded only in 1460, after a false start in the 1440s; but already its Faculty of Arts was torn apart by the opposition of realists and nominalists in the field of scholastic philosophy—to such an extent that for many years two deans had to be appointed, one a realist and one a nominalist, to lead the two factions and to keep the peace. On a more optimistic note: it had also a very distinguished Faculty of Law, the first in Germany to offer civil as well as canon law. Again, as a legacy—as some said, the only worthwhile legacy—from the days of the Church Council which had met there from 1431 to 1449, Basel had become an important centre of the new movement of humanism. (By humanism at this time I mean the study of ancient Latin and Greek literature as sources for new subject-matter and as models for a better literary style. The ancient authors were seldom studied yet in Germany on their own terms, as evidence for a different, alternative way of life and thought; rather they seemed to occupy a place as a sort of secondary authority alongside the Holy Scriptures and the Church Fathers.)

Brant followed the traditional arts course based on the artes liberales; but at the same time he read widely in the field of Latin literature and acquired in particular a great love for Virgil (the spurious texts, let it be said, as well as the genuine poems). He also learned some Greek, but probably not much, and Greek literature came to him mostly in Latin translations. He took his Baccalaureus artium in 1477 and then transferred to the Law Faculty. His mother would have preferred him to be a theologian, but it is perhaps indicative of Brant's cast of mind that he preferred the more practical, less speculative legal studies. (His writings show, however, that he knew a great deal of theology as well.) He received his licence to teach and practise law in 1484 and remained in Basel to teach both in law and in arts and to work for his doctorate (Doctor utriusque iuris), which he received in 1489. In his Latin poetry course his most outstanding pupil was undoubtedly Jacob Locher, who later became a leader of the next generation of German humanists. In 1492, two years before the Narrenschiff appeared, Brant was Dean of Law, and seemed well set for a distinguished academic career.

There is no time to trace the further career of Sebastian Brant and to speak of his return to Strassburg, where he ended his life as town clerk, i.e. as the chief administrative officer of what was virtually an independent state. He died in 1521, just as the upheaval of the Reformation was beginning to make itself felt. Nor can we look in any detail at his writings other than the Narrenschiff: his Roman law textbooks, his many Latin poems on religious and political subjects, his broadsheets in which woodcut and text combine to interpret strange natural phenomena as portents for the future. I must also mention his translations of Latin moral treatises, his edition of the older German didactic poet Freidank, his editions of Latin writers such as Augustine or Ambrose (to which he contributed prefaces and postscripts, often in Latin verse). We need only note two general points: 1. Brant's pessimistic view of the world has little to do with any harsh treatment which he had personally received from society; his whole career as professor and civil servant is one of comfortable middle-class security. 2. His other writings already show him to be an author of great versatility and competence, both in German and Latin; but it is the Narrenschiff alone which gains him a permanent place in German literary history. Before we pass on from biography, let us look at Dürer's portrait of Brant, done in 1520, the year before Brant's death, when he was sixty-three and had recently been seriously ill.

If we look back to the later fifteenth century with our eyes on the Italian Renaissance or the opening up of the ancient world by the humanists and the founding of universities by municipalities and princes (Basel was one among many, our partner university of Tübingen was another) or the invention of printing or the discoveries of Columbus (whose first voyage of 1492 comes only two years before the Narrenschiff, we may well see the period as the beginning of a new) world; and indeed some of Brant's contemporaries did see it that way. To Brant and many others it meant only decline and disaster. The councils at Constance and Basel had largely failed to reform the church: the dissident Hussites in Bohemia and the growing weakness of the Papacy only pointed to the disintegration of the church's institutions. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 had brought the threat of the heathen Turk closer to the west. The Holy Roman Empire had been growing weaker in its central government for centuries and the long, somewhat negative reign of Frederick III, which ended in 1492, can only have increased the sense of decline. It is perhaps little wonder that Brant, like so many others, hailed the new Emperor, the young, vigorous and talented Maximilian I, as the one hope of renewal and restoration. Added to this there was a general disregard for established laws and the standards of behaviour; there was much poverty, beggars swarmed everywhere, while on the other hand a few families had become conspicuously wealthy. In short, the old securities had gone and the world was rushing on to ruin.

In this somewhat meagre context let us now look at the Narrenschiff itself. In its first edition of 1492, it fills a quite substantial volume of 158 leaves and consists of nearly 6,700 verses divided into a preface and 112 chapters of very unequal lengths, each chapter being illustrated by a woodcut. The verse form is simple and infinitely adaptable; each verse has four stresses and the verses normally rhyme in pairs. It is in fact the most common verse form for narrative and didactic poetry in the late Middle Ages and had been since the twelfth century.

The title-page has two woodcuts. The lower one shows the Ship of Fools, apparently without a rudder, with other boats bringing more fools to join the ship. At the top of the picture, Ad Narragoniam indicates the ship's destination, and the words and music are the fools' song: Gaudeamus omnes, ‘Let us all rejoice’. At the foot of the picture are the words Zu schyff Zu schyff bruder: Eß gat, eß gat. (Get on board, brother, we're going); in the picture itself someone is shouting bar noch (meaning, no doubt, ‘come along’). The fool in the middle carrying the banner with the fool's bell on it is labelled Doctor Griff. Now he appears again in the poem, where he is described as a ‘wise and learned man who seizes every man by the ears’, i.e. apparently to tell him the truth clearly and unambiguously. But he too is in cap and bells. So does he indicate that even the wisest men are fools? Or that fools will distort the truth however clearly it is told? Or is Dr Griff perhaps Brant himself, who elsewhere calls himself a fool (‘Der narr Sebastianus Brant’)?—The upper woodcut with the fools in the cart is also ambiguous. Are these fools coming from far and near (so to speak) to join the ship? Or are they fool enough to think they can reach Narragonia over land? Or is the picture, as some think, a local reference to carts or floats in a Shrovetide procession? This juxtaposition of cart and ship also appears in the text of the poem, but without giving much help, though I think the local reference theory is a little unlikely.

At the back of the title-page the Ship of Fools appears again with the same title, the same destination and the same song. This time the ship has not only no rudder but no mast or sail either. Instead we have a banner with a picture of Dr Griff—which surely makes him even more mysterious. Below the picture, under the heading ‘To Narragonia’, there is a quotation from Psalm 106 (in the Vulgate numbering) ‘These are they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters … They mount up to heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man, and all their wisdom is swallowed up.’ Given the fact that the theme of the psalm is ‘God as a refuge in all trouble’, this quotation in this position must surely be meant ironically. You will also notice the elaborate decorated borders, with foliage and flowers and here again occasional fools climbing in the branches. Similar borders run down both sides of each page in the book.

This look at the title-page enables me to make three points about the poem as a whole before we come to the text: 1. the Narrenschiff is a most handsome example of the printer's art and adds to the prestige of Basel as a centre of the book trade. 2. Text and woodcuts are full of realistic detail, of literary and other references and of symbolical features, often expressed very briefly and even casually; the Narrenschiff is not a book for rapid reading, but for lingering over to ponder its meaning. 3. While the Narrenschiff is rightly called a didactic poem, I do not see in it a clear, unambiguous and simple meaning; there seem to me to be considerable elements of ambiguity and paradox, and these must be given their weight in an interpretation of the poem. (Of course, it is possible to say that Brant was just a muddler, and his paradoxes are mere confusion. But I can hardly believe this of a successful practitioner and teacher of law and the author of a much used law textbook. I am sure my colleagues in the Faculty of Law will agree.)

This brings me to my most difficult problem tonight: the language of the poem. Brant's language is, of course, German, but it is a version of a regional dialect of some five hundred years ago, in fact of the German dialect of Alsace and the Upper Rhine. There was at this time no standard German language, but only regional dialects which administrative chanceries, printers and other influences were beginning to mould into suitable vehicles for literature. Brant's language, therefore, though it was no longer a simple peasant dialect, retained many regional features and is in many respects far removed from modern literary German. So I must try to give you some impression of the poem without much in the way of direct quotation from the German text—and if you think this is an impossible way to treat a poem, you have my apology in advance. I only share the fate of all medievalists who work in a foreign language.

The poem begins with a verse preface in which Brant points out how many fools there are in the world, fools who refuse to be instructed by any of the ordinary means. He proposes therefore to collect them in a ship—or rather a whole flotilla of ships—and let them sail away. At the same time, this collection of fools, described in the text and portrayed in the woodcuts, will serve as a mirror into which the reader may gaze and recognize himself and thereby be induced to mend his ways. Among the fools he must include some women; in this he has no intention of insulting good women, but there are, alas! foolish and evil women in the world. (This deference to good women is a faint echo, it seems to me, of the old courtly love conventions of three centuries before.) Finally, says Brant, if the reader looks carefully at this collection of fools and does not recognize himself, then clearly he is a wise man; but let him then beware, for he will get his fool's cap too, as soon as it can be bought at the fair in Frankfurt! And on that note of warning we turn the page and come to Chapter 1.

From now until nearly the end of the poem we are presented with a copious survey, chapter by chapter, of the fools in the world. There are blasphemers, and those who despise God and his word; there are those who abuse their power in church and state; there are the murderers and adulterers, the procurers and prostitutes and those who chase after them; the misers and the usurers are accompanied by the innocents who start some enterprise without adequate financial backing; the quick-tempered, the stubborn, the flatterers, the slanderers and the envious rub shoulders with gluttons, drunkards and those with boorish table manners; fools with a passion for gambling or hunting or outlandish clothes or hair styles go side by side with those who talk in church or bring their dogs to mass; parents who set a bad example to their children are castigated along with children who have no respect for their parents; the incompetent doctors, the patients who fail to follow their doctor's advice, the shameless beggars, the lazy house servants, the students who neglect their studies as well as those who study too much, are all represented—even those fools who are addicted to foreign travel, including apparently Columbus, though he is not mentioned by name and the passage could be read in another way. The list could be made much longer. It represents, in fact, everything from grave sin and serious crime, through lesser misdemeanours, to trivial weakness, foibles and mere eccentricities of the human race. All are presented as fools and all seem to come to us in the random, unclassified, vivid way in which they occur in real life.

In order to give you a little of the ‘feel’ of this shipload of fools, I want to give you, in English prose translation, two contrasting chapters as examples. Here is, first, Chapter 1, ‘On useless books’. This is a typical layout, motto, woodcut, title and first lines of text on the left-hand page, the rest of the text on the right-hand page, filling one opening of the book exactly. No less than seventy-five of the 112 chapters are of this length; and it may well be that this quite external restriction helped to produce the short, crisp sentences, the concentrated aphoristic style and the brief and often cryptic references to illustrations and authorities that are characteristic of the poem. It is only toward the end, when Brant clearly felt a need to write more fully on certain complex subjects, such as the decline of the faith, the coming of Antichrist or the fate of the shipload of fools as a whole, that we find a number of much longer chapters.

And so, let us look at the fool, with his nightcap, his great solemn spectacles and his flyswatter, and listen to him speak. (Only a few speak in their own person; most are described by the author in the third person.)

Den vordantz hat man mir gelan
Dann jch on nutz vil bücher han
Die jch nit lyß, vnd nyt verstan

I've been allowed to lead the dance, for I've many useless books which I don't read and don't understand.

‘ON USELESS BOOKS’

The fact that I sit at the front of the ship has indeed a special meaning. That's not done without cause. I rely on my library. I've a great store of books, but I hardly understand a word of them. Yet I hold them in honour, so I try to keep the flies off them. When people speak about the arts [i.e. the liberal artes] I say: I've got all that safe at home. I'm content to see many books before me. King Ptolemy [i.e. the founder of the ancient library at Alexandria] arranged to have all the books in the world and thought that a great treasure. But he hadn't the right law [i.e. Christianity] and didn't know how to educate himself from them. In the same way I too have many books and yet I read them very little. Why should I rack my brains and worry myself with learning. Anyone who studies a lot becomes an eccentric. After all I can be a Dominus in another way and pay someone to learn for me. Even though I have an uncouth mind, when I'm with scholars I can say ‘ita’ for ‘yes’. I'm quite happy with the German order, for I know very little Latin. I know that ‘vinum’ means ‘wine’, ‘cuclus’ ‘a cuckoo’ [i.e. a fool], ‘stultus’ ‘a fool’ and that I'm called ‘domine doctor’. My ears are hidden, or you'd soon see a miller's beast [i.e. an ass].

Here the satirical portrait is presented with mild humour, though the serious point of the chapter is clear. The academic hypocrisy and the failure to learn from precious books are quite enough to make the learned academic Brant put this fool in the first place. Can we perhaps recognize him in the university world even today?

Now, as a contrast, I take Chapter 98 ‘On outlandish fools’. You will hear a nationalistic note in this—a feature not uncommon among the German humanists. The subject-matter, however, is really wider than this.

Hie hab ich gstelt noch vil zu samen
Die narren sint, vnd hant den nāmen
Dern andern [i.e. ander] narren sich doch schammen

Here I have collected many others who are fools and bear that name, though other fools are ashamed of them.

‘ON OUTLANDISH FOOLS’

There are very many other useless people who are most ugly in their fool's dress and are quite inured to folly, tied to the devil's tail and not to be separated from it. I shall pass them by without saying a word and let them stay in their folly and write little about them, for example, Saracens, Turks and heathen, all who are separated from the faith. To these I compare the school of heretics who in their folly occupy the professorial chairs in Prague [i.e. the Hussites] and have extended their fellowship to include the lands of the Moravians, who—ugly creatures that they are—don the fool's cap. And further all who worship any but the three persons of the one true God. To such people our faith is a butt of mockery. These I do not regard as fools pure and simple; they must stand on their fool's cloak, for their folly is so obvious that there's no cloth to make a cloak for each of them [this is not very clear; it probably means ‘they are not worth even a fool's dress each, so they must just share a single one’]. Moreover all who have fallen into despair and are enmeshed in the devil's bonds, as for example foolish ladies and evil women [these are sometimes identified as witches, sometimes as prostitutes], all procuresses and peacock-drivers [i.e. male procurers] and others who are in sin and completely blinded by their folly. Along with them I want to mention those who take their own life or hang themselves, those who perform abortions and those who drown their child. These are not worthy of the law nor worth teaching nor even holding up to ridicule; yet they are counted as fools, their folly gives them all fools' caps!

This is one of the most terrible chapters in the book, a list of those who are so far gone in the blindness of their folly that even other fools are ashamed of them. It is difficult to see satire or humour here; there is only a cold and harsh abandonment of non-Christians, heretics and those in grave sin to the devil and perdition. Fortunately there is hardly another chapter to parallel this one; most other chapters are more like Chapter 1, though often the satire is sharper and the tone is more sombre.

To end this description, let us return to the woodcuts. It will already be clear that the Narrenschiff without woodcuts is incomplete. Text and pictures belong together; the woodcut either illuminates the chapter as a whole or brings out some particular part of it or is a further interpretation of the title. It has been claimed, indeed, that the illiterate or near-illiterate observer would get the meaning of the poem from the pictures alone. I should be interested to test this assertion experimentally; but I am pretty sure it goes far beyond the truth. Text and picture supplement each other and neither is quite complete without the other. Any detailed commentary on the woodcuts is properly the job of an art historian. I shall confine myself to saying that the old idea that Brant made the woodcuts as well as writing the text has long been abandoned. After a long debate it seems now to be agreed, first, that the woodcuts are the work of four artists and, second, that no less than seventy-three of them are by Albrecht Dürer, who was in Basel working for various printers at this time and who certainly knew Brant long before the portrait of 1520. The woodcuts to the two chapters I have translated are not by Dürer, but he did the double woodcut on the title-page, with the cart above and the ship below.

The Narrenschiff was an immediate and resounding success. In the same year as the first edition appeared, 1494, there were three reprints, unauthorized but accurate, at Reutlingen, Nürnberg and Augsburg, as well as an altered and expanded version in Strassburg. The next year, 1495, a second authorized edition appeared with two extra chapters and in 1499 came a third authorized edition beginning with a note in verse protesting against pirated editions and demanding that if any more fools were to be added this should be left to ‘der Narr Sebastianus Brant’ himself. To be brief: between 1494 and 1512, thirteen reprints and versions can be counted, six of them authorized, then no more until 1531, ten years after Brant's death. Between 1531 and 1574 came thirteen more reprints, then three in the 1620s and a late straggler about 1670. All these later reprints were more or less altered, some grossly mutilated; none had the woodcuts and a few were adapted for Protestant readers.

Meanwhile the poem was translated into various languages—or rather, to judge by modern standards of translation, paraphrased and more or less freely adapted to suit local circumstances. The Low German version of 1497 (revised in 1519) was made direct from Brant's text; but most versions were made, not directly from the German, but from Jacob Locher's elaborate Latin translation, which appeared in 1497 with most of the original woodcuts. Brant had intended to make a Latin version himself; but instead he persuaded Locher to undertake the task, and contributed substantial supplementary passages in Latin verse. Locher's Stultifera Navis, in a great variety of classical, medieval and invented metres, was really a free adaptation in which Brant's text became less popular, less medieval, more classical, more overtly learned. It is very important to note that it was through this version more often than from the German text itself that the poem became known outside Germany and began its remarkable conquest of Europe. Three French versions are noted, in 1497, 1498, 1499, a Flemish one in 1500, two English ones in 1507-8 and in 1509, the first by Alexander Barclay based on the Latin, French and ‘Dutch’ (which could, of course, mean ‘German’) and the second in prose by Henry Watson. Finally there is a Dutch version as late as 1584. To go on from here and trace the influence of the Narrenschiff in Europe would need a detailed investigation of the main European literatures; and for that we have no time tonight. After the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century, it is said, the Narrenschiff was forgotten. But it was never quite forgotten. It is mentioned from time to time in the eighteenth century and in a very different cultural climate. Christoph Martin Wieland has an article on Brant (with a portrait) in the Teutscher Merkur of 1776. The scholarly editions begin with Strobel's of 1839 and above all Zarncke's monumental work of 1854. There is a modern German translation in the Reclam series and two modern English versions. And finally Kathleen Anne Porter's novel, Ship of Fools, 1962, draws at least some of its inspiration direct from Brant's text.

It remains to record that Brant's success was not only a popular one; the Narrenschiff made its mark on some of the leading scholars of the day. Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, for example, called it in 1497 ‘divina satyra’ (apparently with a reference to Dante's Divina Commedia). The next year Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg began a course of sermons based on it in the cathedral at Strassburg. Jacob Wimpheling, another Alsatian humanist, thought it should be prescribed reading in schools—the Latin version, however, not the German version. And Ulrich von Hutten, perhaps the real poet among the German humanists, said of Brant that he ‘makes German songs according to a new law and forces barbarous words into connected verses’ (qui germana nova carmina lege facit / barbaraque in numeros compellit verba ligatos). It is clear that among scholars and the general reading public, in Germany and beyond it, the Narrenschiff was unambiguously a triumph!

Up to now, ladies and gentlemen, I have kept my remarks at the level of description because my enquiries make me think that Brant and his Narrenschiff are not really very widely known in Leeds today! But I must now spend a little time in conclusion discussing some of the ways in which the Narrenschiff might be interpreted. In the last few years a great change has come over this field of study. Ever since the Narrenschiff became a subject of scholarly study in the mid nineteenth century a great deal of useful work has been done in establishing a good text, in understanding the language and therefore the plain literal meaning of the poem, in identifying the many proverbs and popular sayings which Brant uses, as well as the references to the Bible, the Church Fathers, the ancient (mostly Roman) classics and other authorities which are found in every chapter. Brant's life and his other works have been studied and the various translations and adaptations have been compared with the original. But there has sometimes been a tendency to find in the poem what one was looking for, to approach it with preconceived ideas and to choose chapters and passages which support this or that view. This is all too easy since the separate chapters can be very readily detached from each other and the way in which a few well known chapters appear in anthologies only underlines this kind of fragmentation.

Recently, however, we have seen a welcome new approach to the Narrenschiff. The questions now being asked are, for example: How can we explain or understand the immense and immediate success the poem enjoyed at its publication and for many years after? Is there any consistency and coherence in the form or the content of the poem, or is it (as some would say) merely a collection of separate chapters conveying contradictory or incompatible views? A number of far-reaching debates are going on, and these will no doubt continue for some time yet before a new Narrenschiff orthodoxy emerges.

The first debate is on the form of the poem. It has, of course, long been recognized that the Narrenschiff is written in a concentrated, epigrammatic, pointed style with many popular proverbs and with eminently quotable aphoristic lines and groups of lines which could hardly fail to please an age accustomed (as we are not accustomed) to directly didactic poetry. The skilful versification (a great improvement on much that had gone before) and the obvious attractiveness and interest of the woodcuts also have their effect. Again, the many references to and illustrations from ancient writers would hardly disturb fifteenth-century readers, as they seem to have disturbed some more modern critics; medieval poets were not greatly concerned with ‘originality’ and they were in no way averse to quoting their authorities frequently. It is true that some of these references in Brant are so brief and cryptic that it might be thought unlikely that most people would recognize them (though others are so well known and so often used that they have become clichés). Perhaps the trouble here is that in speaking of a great popular success we may have got the idea that the poem was read and enjoyed by the simplest artisan or peasant. This is, of course, impossible. The simple peasants and artisans were illiterate, and (despite all that is claimed for the woodcuts) the poem is surely addressed to the educated literate middle-class public, who might be expected to recognize the references and also to be able to interpret the symbols.

But all this refers to separate chapters. The new element is a claim that the poem as a whole, far from being formless, is governed by the strictest rules of form. Professor Ulrich Gaier of the University of California has claimed that each chapter can be analysed according to the rules of ancient rhetoric, and indeed the rules recommended by the ancient handbook known as the Rhetorica ad Herennium. He also claims that the poem as a whole falls into groups of chapters corresponding to the sections of an oratio suasoria (hortatory or suasory speech) as described in the same ancient handbook. More recently he has argued further that the Narrenschiff has many of the features of an ancient satire as understood by, say, Horace or Juvenal. Some doubts about these claims might perhaps arise when we find that in the second edition of the poem Brant inserts two long extra chapters and that in the prefatory note to the third edition he seems to suggest that he might well add other chapters still. Nevertheless Gaier has shown with great plausibility that the poem is not a formless collection of chapters, but a coherent whole, composed with great care to culminate in a striking group of chapters, which include most of the long ones I mentioned earlier and which make the Narrenschiff the outstanding literary work in Germany in the half century before the Reformation.

The other and more complex debate is concerned with the content of the poem. Here again it has long been recognized that Brant had a real concern to hold up to ridicule the follies of his age and, by inviting his readers to recognize themselves in his mirror and mend their ways, to renew and reform the social, political and religious life of his time; and it may well be that this moral satire had its effect (though, one suspects, only in a fairly limited way). The present debate revolves round two themes: the meaning of the ship and of the fool of the title. The ship, it is clear, is no invention of Brant but has a long history, beginning in the ancient world, being reinterpreted by the Church Fathers, and carrying a wealth of theological symbolism down through the Middle Ages to Brant's day. I must regretfully put aside this theme as requiring a whole lecture and more to itself alone, and shall confine myself to saying that the critics who have complained that Brant loses sight of the ship motif soon after the beginning of the poem can hardly have read to the end. It is true that it is not mentioned for long stretches of the poem; but anyone who has read the last chapters and especially the terrible chapter 108, in which the fools foresee their aimless voyagings, the wreck of their ship and their coming death by drowning, will know that the ship returns in a most impressive way.

The essentials of the debate may become clear if we concentrate on the other theme, the fool. The fool as a vehicle of satire and moral teaching is not an invention of Brant's; there is a long tradition of such literature before and after him. It is, however, unwise to assume that Brant is just following the tradition at any particular point; we shall do better to look at the poem itself. What does Brant mean by a fool? Is there anything, among this great variety of individual fools, that might be regarded as the essence of folly? Brant himself gives us some help, but at once poses certain problems. ‘The whole world’, he says in his preface, ‘lives in the darkness of night and persists blindly in sin, all streets and lanes are filled with fools who spend their time in nothing but folly and yet are unwilling to bear the name’. It seems from this that fools are sinners. If we are all fools, as the preface also hinted, and therefore all sinners, this is compatible with the Christian dimensions which the word ‘sinners’ implies. There are also many passages dealing with fools who are judged and condemned by God. When we ask, however, who is the wise man (as opposed to the fool who is the sinner) and turn naturally enough to the last chapter, entitled ‘The wise man’, in the hope of some explanation, we find here a fairly close translation of the pseudo-Virgilian poem “Vir Bonus et sapiens” (“The good and wise man”). Here a much more Stoic than Christian wisdom appears. The wise man, here and indeed elsewhere in the poem, is the man of reason, living with moderation and with a clear goal in view at all times, always in cool, unemotional control of his actions and reactions, self-sufficient and self-centred. The contrast between this and the Christian ideal comes out, for example, in chapter 99, when, as we saw, certain classes of fool are so far gone in sin that they are beyond mercy and must be abandoned to the devil, or in chapter 58 ‘On forgetting oneself’, in which the man who comes to the aid of another while forgetful of his own advantage is condemned as a fool. We are thus prompted to ask: Is Brant really the devout Christian, devoted to the Church and desperately trying to restore and reform society in a Christian sense? Or does he wish to preserve the Church (and also, perhaps, the Empire) as a social institution only, while his real interest is the application of the law? Or is he, in fact, despite all the traditional Christian language and references, more akin—here again, as in the matter of rhetorical form—to later humanists seeking a refuge in a Stoic type of wisdom, ‘teres et rotundus’, as the “Vir Bonus” says, ‘round and whole like an egg’, as Brant translates? It would no doubt be far-fetched and eccentric to accept this sort of interpretation, though evidence in its favour is by no means lacking. But granted that Brant's Christianity is not in doubt, what kind of Christianity is reflected in the Narrenschiff? Is Brant the Christian humanist looking out with confidence to the future? I find this difficult to believe and see in him rather a strong element of resignation. This is not despair, for he certainly believes that some fools, however few, will find wisdom (however that may be defined) and hence salvation, though at the same time he admits that he finds it difficult to remove the fool's cap from his own head. But those with new-found wisdom will be few, and the number of fools will be so overwhelming that he seems resigned to seeing society, Church and Empire, crumble and decline even further without his being able to arrest the process.

I must ask you finally, ladies and gentlemen: has the Narrenschiff anything to say to our own day? Some among you will no doubt feel that its echo today is so faint and remote that it has nothing more to say to the modern world; so you will put it aside with a sigh of relief and forget all about it for ever. But some of you may think it worth another look. If you do make closer contact with it, either in the original German or through an adequate translation, you will be assured of much amusement from Brant's quiet, restrained humour and great enjoyment from the splendid woodcuts, as well as a vivid picture of at least some aspects of fifteenth-century society. If you then dig deeper and try to understand the problems—and here I may perhaps say (in the words of a well-known Professor Emeritus of this University) ‘I do not ask you to believe Brant; I only ask you to understand him’—you will find yourself dealing with questions—I do not necessarily say ‘answers’—in theology and philosophy, morals and politics which are as modern, even unavoidable to the citizens of the new community, the EEC, as they were to the subjects of the old community, the Holy Roman Empire in which the Narrenschiff was written.

Bibliographical Note

This lecture was delivered to a general audience as an introduction to the Narrenschiff and is printed substantially as it was delivered. Detailed references to the text and to secondary literature are therefore not included. The following bibliographical information may be useful to those who wish to know the poem and its author better. The 1494 edition of the Narrenschiff is a very rare book. It has been reproduced in two facsimile editions:

1. Das Narrenschiff. Faksimiledruck für die Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen, besorgt von H. Kögler. Basle 1913.

2. Das Narrenschiff. Faksimile der Erstausgabe von 1494 mit einem Nachwort von Franz Schultz. Strasbourg 1913.

Critical editions:

3. Sebastian Brant, Narrenschiff. Herausgegeben von Friedrich Zarncke. Leipzig 1854. Reprints Hildesheim 1961, Darmstadt 1964.—Contains much valuable material, including a generous selection from Brant's other writings.

4. Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff … Herausgegeben von Manfred Lemmer. Tübingen 1962, second ed. 1968.—The best critical edition, with a valuable introduction. The second edition includes the woodcuts, reduced in size.

Translations into English verse:

5. The Ship of Fools. By Sebastian Brant. Translated into rhyming couplets with introduction and commentary by Edwin H. Zeydel, with reproductions of the original woodcuts. New York 1944. Reprinted as a paperback, New York 1962 (Dover Books), and in hard covers, New York 1966.

6. Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools. Translated by William Gillis. London: The Folio Society. 1971.—Includes the woodcuts in the original size.

There is an extensive and growing secondary literature. The most useful titles up to 1967 are given in Lemmer's edition of 1968 (see item 4, above).