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INTRODUCTION HE Praise of Folly is a part of the so-called ‘Fool Literature’ produced by the ferment of new ideas which preceded the Reformation. Men had discovered fresh standards, old formulas were tested, and the discrepancies between principle and practice became more apparent. ‘There was a widespread attempt to cure the evils which had crept into the mediaeval Church and those which vitiated the body politic. Satire is a sharp instrument to cut away the blinding film of custom, and writers strove to convince a fool of his folly by showing him himself. Yet human nature is slow to change, it is easier to see faults than to amend them: in the twentieth century men are very much as they were in the fifteenth, still, for instance, buying books which they do not read, like the first fool who embarked in the ‘ Narrenschiff ’. This was the title of the book which set the fashion in fools. Its author, Sebastian Brant a2
