Praise Of Folly Research Articles

Erasmus’ Encomia

Abstract Erasmus praised contemporaries in books, letters, prefaces, and adagia. His public career was launched with an ostentatious work of praise, the Panegyricus ad Philippum Austriae (1504), in which he satisfied court expectations and literary tradition. He titled five works Encomium; one of them—the Moriae Encomium (Praise of Folly)—is by far his most popular book. This article examines his encomia and his interest in writing them. It identifies the models and conventions Erasmus inherited and recounts the trouble he took to make his encomia unique.

Life experience of tax authorities, i.e. hammer againsttaxpayers or praise of folly

This article is aimed at the critical analysis of the tax authorities’ practise of referring to the life experience whileevaluating evidence. The material for the analysis consists of a few examples of court judgments showing howtax authorities refer to the “life experience”. The analysis shows that such a reasoning can provide for a hammeragainst taxpayers, since many times there is no possibility to enter a reasonable discussion with such a reasoning,hence, any attempt of taxpayer to defend themselves can end in a probatio diabolica. The analysed way ofreasoning can also constitute “praise of folly” since it can lead to adverse consequences for the taxpayers, whopresent exceptional qualities while conducting their affairs.

Erasmus in Borges, Borges in Erasmus: First Surveys of an Unexplored Genealogy

It seems impossible to identify areas of the Borgesian corpus that have not been studied by experts from all latitudes and periods, but in fact this is true in relation to the presence of the Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam. Taking as a starting point similarities in content and style between Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly and some of Borges’ narrative prose, essays and poems, as well as, conversely, from eight occurrences of Erasmus in seven of Borges’ short essays, this article aims to stress this literary relationship. This pioneering though certainly not exhaustive study also unearths a wide and unexpected network of authors linking Erasmo and Borges across centuries and continents.

Det paradoksale sprog i Erasmus af Rotterdams Dårskabens lovprisning

Erasmus of Rotterdam’s The Praise of Folly is a highly original paradoxical encomium in that the praise is undertaken by Folly herself. In his insightful work, Günter Bader points out the structural importance and theological consequences of this second-degree paradox in Folly’s self-praise, from which this article has drawn inspiration in order to understand among other things the complexity of the role of language and words in relation to the cognition of things in The Praise of Folly. This complexity undoubtedly pertains to other works in the opus of Erasmus, as is shown in the article, which forces us to reconsider our reception and interpretation of Erasmian Christology, Pneumatology and anthropology.

ΜΙΧΑΛΗΣ ΧΡΥΣΑΝΘΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ, Υπερρεαλιστικά εγκώμια υπερρεαλιστών: Ανταγωνισμός μεταξύ Διοσκούρων;

Surrealist “praises” (encomia) of surrealists: Empeirikos and Engonopoulos compete? The purpose of the paper is to explore the way the Greek surrealists, Andreas Empeirikos and Nikos Engonopoulos, use the form of the “praise” (encomium) in a fashion that relates to the Ancient Greek tradition and to its Renaissance revival (e.g. Erasmus, “Praise of Folly”), in order to establish the basic principles of their approaches, to deal with negative criticism of their work, to underscore the merits of the ideas and the work of their seniors, but, also, to playfully criticise them and, last but not least, to support and praise each other. The period examined in detail is that from 1935 to 1945, while emphasis is laid on Empeirikos’ long “praise” of Engonopoulos published in 1945, which redrew the rules. The surrealist “praise” is examined as a “agonistic” form, as a competition between poets and artists and as a defensive weapon against malevolent attacks from critics.

“Good in Every Thing”: Erasmus and Communal Virtue in As You Like It

This essay explores the Erasmian humanism and ecosociable sensibility of As You Like It. Both Shakespeare and Erasmus cultivated recreation and play, practiced an irenic and ecumenical approach to wisdom, respected women's virtuous capacity, and acknowledged their kinship with other creatures. Like The Praise of Folly and Erasmus's writings on friendship and peace, As You Like It builds a multidimensional portrait of virtue as lively, gracious, embodied, performative, hospitable, and always open to irony — aware of the costs and conditions of virtue in the world. In his irenic writings, Erasmus lays out an account of human nature that highlights human beings’ vulnerability, sociability, and creaturely state. How does a naturally gentle species become bellicose? Echoing the teachings of Pythagoras, Erasmus finds the origins of war in the killing of animals, first in self-defense and then in the hunt. In As You Like It, Shakespeare traces the emergence of human and animal aggression from acts of self-preservation and care, and he stages a softened Augustinianism in a created world that is “very good” (Gen. 1:31). His Erasmian sensibility is also Orphic and Pythagorean. This essay supplements Renaissance humanism with Rabbinic and post-Rabbinic readings of Genesis in order to construe the virtue of magnanimity as a hospitable stance toward different wisdom traditions.

ТАКСОНОМИЯ СМЕХОВОГО ДИСКУРСА В ЛИТЕРАТУРНОМ СОЗНАНИИ ЭПОХИ ВОЗРОЖДЕНИЯ

The article is devoted to the analysis of the comic Renaissance literature through the prism of individual works in order to identify the main comic functions. The Renaissance laughter culture formation is one of the urgent and underdeveloped problems of modern humanities adressed to the study of the Renaissance. The purpose of our work and the tasks dictated by it – in the context of the «laughter word» of the Renaissance to reveal the main comic functions in the literature of this period that were formed by a new worldview and new relationships amoung people. The stated goal determines the need to use hermenegutic (analysis of literary texts), typological (comparison of various comic functions), historical (solution of a literary problem in the context of a historical epoch) research methods. The “discovery of the world and man” that was characteristic of the Renaissance also took place in fiction. Renaissance realism turned it’s face to the everyday life of a person, and literature willingly accepted a new theme for itself including comedy. The article highlights various social functions of laughter that were used in Renaissance literature. Recreational laughter function is the original and oldest one. Laughter is evidence of pleasure, relaxation, rest. This laughter’s function is necessary for the normal functioning of not only an individual, but society as a whole. Such works as fables, schwankis, facies, “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Rabelais, “Don Quixote” by Cervantes, comedies by W. Shakespeare, their main task was entertaining first of all. Their laughter is a clear evidence of inner freedom and healthy vitality. Laughter is a social phenomenon, and therefore it must meet the well-known requirements of people livihg together. Therefore, one of the main of functions is social. Laughter should be a kind of social gesture; it frees society from mechanical rigidity. We single out this function in Luigi Pulci’s poem “Morgante”. Funny and serious, faith and disbelief, naivety and scientific coexist side by side in this work, defining its heroic-comic character. The ontological aspects of laugher are closely related to cognitive ones. The cognitive laughter function has a great importance in revealing social negative aspects, in bringing them to the point of absurdity and thereby revealing their inconsistency and the obligation to eliminate them. This laughter function is represented in Sebastian Brant`s poem “The Ship of Fools”, in Rotterdams satire “The Praise of Folly”, in F. Rabelais` novel “Gargantua and Pantagruel”. Laugh as an effective social sanction (the sanctioning function of laughter) is presented in Cervantes` novel. The main thing in Don Quixote is not so much a parody of chivalry as a realistic disclosure of new social conditions and worldview discoveries, which was a parody of a past life. At the end of the novel, realizing his madness, Don Quixote thereby frees himself from his comic. The novel takes on a pronounced tragic connotation. The title character recognizes his doom and ceases to be pathetic, he becomes a knight of the “sad image”, he dies not a pathetic madman, but a humble Christian. The various functions of laughter, presented in the Renaissance literature were an effective tool in the fight against the remnants of the Middle Ages and the establishment of a new worldview.

How Women Wrote about Themselves: A Corpus- informed Comparison of Women Writers’ Defences in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England

Women’s written defences of their sex developed within the literary context of the querelle des femmes, a mainly male debate on female intellectual worth, which started in the Middle Ages and came to a peak during the Renaissance. This paper focuses on the discourse some women writers started to develop in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England, when the growing number of misogynist attacks led some of them to respond in kind. The first works directly engaging the topics of the querelle are usually identified in Isabella Whitney’s poem The Copy of a Letter (1567) and Jane Anger’s Jane Anger Her Protection For Women (1589). These are coupled with three later pamphlets framed in the so-called Swetnam debate, from the name of the misogynist pamphleteer to whom these three women writers replied, namely A Muzell for Melastomus (1617) by Rachel Speght, Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (1617) by Ester Sowernam and The Worming of a Mad Dogge: or, A Soppe for Cerberus, a Redargution of the Bayter of Women (1617) by Constantia Munda. The qualitative reading of the texts reveals differences among them both in content and structure, which is supported by a corpus-informed quantitative comparison between the earlier and the later texts. The quantitative analysis also shows differences in the use of specific high and low frequency querelle-related lemmas, which signal a variation in the semantic fields related to the discourse on women. Such a mixed research method approach suggests that these variations could not be entirely ascribed to those literary works which had established the formal guidelines of the genre of the controversy, The Praise of Folly (1509) by Erasmus of Rotterdam and De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529) by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. To understand where these differences may come from, the English querelle texts are quantitatively compared with a small corpus of Italian defences of women, including Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600) by Moderata Fonte and La nobilità, et l’eccellenza delle donne, co’diffetti, et mancamenti, de gli huomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, 1600; 1621) by Lucrezia Marinella. This quantitative analysis shows that English and Italian women writers appear to share some structural and content-related characteristics which cannot be found in either Erasmus’ or Agrippa’s works or contemporary English writers dealing with the querelle. The hypothesis is thus advanced that there may have been literary contacts between England and Italy that indirectly influenced the development of the discourse on women within the context of the querelle des femmes.

Book Reviews: Stealth, Land of Wondrous Cold, In Praise of Folly

Book Reviews: Stealth, Land of Wondrous Cold, In Praise of Folly

ТРАДИЦИЯ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ О ГЛУПЦАХ В ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ СЕВЕРНОГО ВОЗРОЖДЕНИЯ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ НЕМЕЦКИХ ШВАНКОВ, НАРОДНОЙ КНИГИ «ШИЛЬДБЮРГЕРЫ» И «ПОХВАЛЫ ГЛУПОСТИ» Э. РОТТЕРДАМСКОГО)

The article analyses the interpretation of the foolishness theme in the German Renaissance literature. It is shown that from the viewpoint of the humanistic thought that was established at the turn of the XV-XVI centuries, the medieval world appeared stupid and uneducated, rejecting new knowledge and remaining ignorant, adhering to the principles of scholasticism. The authors show that, if in the schwanks of J. Pauli, J. Wickram, J. Frey, M. Montanus and in S. Brant’s “Ship of Fools”, which are instructive in nature, stupidity is represented as a social vice, then in “Schildbürgers” and in “The Praise of Folly” by Erasmus of Rotterdam, it is distinctly carnival and expands to the metaphor of human existence.

The Praise of Folly and the Limits of Satiric Licence

Abstract In this essay, I reconsider the proposition that Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly is a satire—an attribution of genre that has long been treated as a truism. I argue that greater attention to several key sources can adjust our understanding of both the text and its kind. The article examines the early reception of Folly’s speech; a pivotal passage in the text itself; crucial translation choices; and Erasmus’ reflections on both his creation and the nature of satire. I investigate the idea of the Praise as a satire not to quibble about generic designations but to bring into relief Erasmus’ contribution to questions of creative licence during the Renaissance; in particular, the permissible scope of social critique, or how to approach the darker side of epideixis.

A Shakespearean Exploration of Erasmus’ festine lente

ABSTRACTShakespeare may have been influenced by Erasmus’ work, by both his Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly) and his Adagia. Among more than three thousand adages, one seems particularly relevant as regards time and the way to deal with and experience it in Shakespeare’s drama, his adage 1001: “Festina lente: make haste slowly,” which became one of the most famous Renaissance maxims expressed by a variety of emblems such as a dolphin around an anchor, a tortoise carrying a sail, a butterfly on a crab. After considering the origin and transmission of the paradoxical proverb (Octavius Augustus, Titus Vespasianus and Aldus Manutius) and Erasmus’ various interpretations of this demanding ability to “rightly combine promptness at the opportune moment with cautious deliberation,” this paper argues that tragic as well as ironically comic events in Shakespeare’s plays are triggered from the characters’ inability to follow the Erasmian adage, both as regards private and political issues, out of whether rashness, over-hastiness and lack of mental control or excess of deliberation and untimely delaying.

Ready , Oliver Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963–2013 (review)

REVIEWS 353 Gaining a place at the prestigious Moscow State University to study classics, he was — as is related in the second chapter — subsequently expelled. Erofeev always said that the reason was his non-attendance at compulsory military training, but as the three authors discovered by interviewing various Moscow intellectuals, he in fact ignored the entire formal process, not attending lectures and seminars, and not appearing at exams. The following chapters describe his uncompleted studies in other high schools, various odd jobs, his marriages and his sojourns in hospitals, where doctors unsuccessfully tried to cure their extraordinary patient of alcoholism. The tale concludes with an account of Erofeev’s last years, his late writing, huge fame, adoration and admiration by the public and his friends, conversion to Catholicism and his horrible illness. Throat cancer might have not killed him if he had been allowed to travel to France for a life-saving operation and treatment, but the Soviet authorities denied him travel documents under the absurdpretextthattwenty-threeyearsearliertherehadbeensomeinterruptions in his working life. He lost his voice, being able to speak only with the help of a mechanical French device. Venedikt Erofeev’s life ended on 1 October 1990. As a result of their research, Lekmanov, Sverdlov and Simanovskii have managed to produce a unique biography — the life story and world-view of Russia’s last tragic genius of the twentieth century. This biography illustrates not only Erofeev’s extraordinary talent and personality, but also gives an enormously valuable account of life in the late Soviet Union. Modestly priced (at just over £8), this book is a delight to read and an essential resource for everyone who has an interest in Russian life and culture. It deserves a place in all research libraries. UCL SSEES Svetlana Shnitman-McMillin Ready, Oliver. Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963– 2013. Russian Transformations: Literature, Thought, Culture, 6. Peter Lang, Oxford, New York and Vienna, 2017. ix + 406 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. €61.95: £49.95: $75.95 (paperback). In this meticulously researched volume, Oliver Ready explores the late-Soviet and post-Soviet evolution of one of Russia’s most enduring literary stereotypes. The book is divided into three main sections, which address samizdat classics, texts written after 1980 and the legacy of the fool in post-Soviet literature respectively. The main body of research is preceded by a survey of the (holy-) fool archetype throughout the centuries, from the iurodivye of the middle ages, fools in Christ seeking truth through provocative and aggressive behaviour, to SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 354 the more immediate precursors of Ready’s research subjects. These precursors are the Russian classics, Gogol´, Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, as well as early Soviet authors such as Olesha, Zoshchenko and Platonov, who ‘articulated ambivalent responses to the new order’ (p. 29) and are less commonly read as authors of ‘fool’ narratives, perhaps because their fools can lay no claim to being ‘holy’. Part Two is prefaced by a discussion of the Silver Age thinker Vasilii Rozanov, one cultural model of folly who influenced many later authors. The complicated cultural web in which Ready thus places his subjects significantly enriches our reading. Ready repeatedly underlines the origin of the late Soviet fool in underground culture and attributes several paradigm shifts to this fact. Firstly, the underground engendered a first person narrator living in a solipsistic universe. When narrator and fool are one, the reader is plunged into a world entirely dependent on this single, distorted consciousness. Secondly, the novels can be read as implicit criticism of the underground and the role of the fool in society, discussed below. Not all literary folly/foolishness is recognizably Christian, and Christian folly is not necessarily specifically Orthodox. This is shown persuasively in the example of the most iconic fool of late Soviet literature, the hero of Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow Circles. Through a parallel reading of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly, Ready explores Venichka’s indebtedness to the Western tradition, grounded in the theology of St Paul (1 Corinthians) and Nicholas of Cusa’s concept of learned ignorance. This is a refreshing alternative to the commonplace reading of Venichka as a...

Quodammodo transfiguratum est in animum: Erasmus’ doctrine of the resurrection of the body and its Origenian roots

Abstract The paper addresses Erasmus’ doctrine of the resurrection of the body in relationship with its Origenian inheritance, its polemical context and the general hermeneutical attitude of Erasmus. The mind-body dualism and the Platonism of Erasmus’ doctrine are better understood in relation to Origen’s Pauline doctrine of the resurrected body. A passage particularly revealing of this Origenian reception, in a mystical direction, is the conclusion of Erasmus’ masterpiece, the Praise of Folly. Through this text, the paper aims to clarify Erasmus’ concept of resurrection as transfiguration, from the letter to the spirit.

Between Erasmus and More, Abraxa(s), an Anamorphic Name

Abstract Before Utopus conquered the island, it was called Abraxa. To create its initial name, Thomas More shortened the name of a deity, invented by the Syrian Christian gnostic teacher Basilides, Abraxas. This note seeks to explain this change by studying the occurrences of the word Abraxas in Erasmus’ work (edition of St Jerome’s works, Praise of Folly). Abraxa then appears as an anamorphic name, an effort of wisdom and a sign of pride. The utopian wisdom is condemned to death. The dialogue between Erasmus and More through this word shows how much the anamorphic woodcuts of Ambrosius Holbein are an excellent illustration of what Abraxa/Utopia is: an ironic invention of a self-conscious pride.

Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature by Joel B. Lande

Reviewed by: Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature by Joel B. Lande Daniel Carranza Joel B. Lande. Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 2018. 366 pages. ISBN 9781501727108. Its title an alliterative echo of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Joel Lande’s Persistence of Folly tracks the many historical transformations undergone by the figure of the fool from the Early Modern period to the Age of Goethe. Anything but a straightforward literary historical account, Lande’s study reconstructs the evolving media-historical and public discursive coordinates that allowed for the continuous persistence of this bawdy agent of dramatic discontinuity. The fool is not understood here as an individual character nor even as a stock type, but as a role qua form that achieves variable theatrical embodiments in novel historical contexts. The theatrical form of the fool thereby functions as a kind of seismograph that renders legible how different periods negotiated the distinction between Scherz and Ernst, itself an evolving index of a “deep cultural need to regulate laughter” (3). As Lande demonstrates, this distinction is ultimately tied to that between the non-literary and the literary. One of the study’s central ideas is that the fool was a decidedly unliterary figure that contributed (via its initial banishment and subsequent reintegration) to the emergence of German dramatic ‘literature’ as such. Three theoretical innovations exemplified in the study deserve immediate remark. The first is Lande’s deft avoidance of any paleo-formalist sequestration of questions of dramatic structure from historicity: dramatic form in all of its intricate detail is read here as inextricably bound to historical context in the very broadest of senses, from the media of theatrical performance (e.g., the wandering stage) to political discourses (e.g., the nascent biopolitics of Policeywissenschaft). As a result, Lande’s discussions of individual dramatic works (many of which are quite neglected) tend to also double as characterizations of the entire ‘theatrical culture’ that hosted them. A second theoretical avenue opened up by this approach lies in the historicization of the very idea of literariness. As Lande’s final chapter (consisting of close readings of Goethe’s Faust I and Kleist’s Der zerbrochene Krug) demonstrates, the most self-reflexive of aesthetic turns in these decidedly literary works draws on and creatively transforms the base conventions that governed the fool’s seemingly senseless antics. Literariness thus emerges not only as a structural feature of texts, but as a historico-institutional achievement of the public sphere in the wake of early Enlightenment theatrical reforms. The study here provides important impulses for those thinking about the emergence of national literatures in non-Germanic contexts. A third theoretical innovation can be found in how the study ties the literary/non-literary distinction to the medial consideration of what Goodman would call the theater’s status as an ‘allographic’ art made up of a written script that sponsors an ephemeral performance. As Lande shows, this privileging of the script as the source of the dramatic work’s identity was not always the case, above all for ‘pre-literary’ stages for which scripts functioned as revisable templates legitimately deviated from [End Page 665] and even abandoned. Rendering German drama ‘literary’ turns out to have depended on a valorization of fixed textuality at the expense of the fool’s improvisatory exuberance The study’s first part elucidates “[t]he game rules the fool plays by” (61) by distinguishing between an open-ended, fluid acting script and a more fixed dramatic text. The theatrical culture organized around the fool was improvisational, itinerant, and lacked a conception of authorial originality. Instead, scripts and their more primary performative realizations were conceived as partaking in “an ongoing chain of production that allowed for the unrestricted appropriation and redeployment of pre-existing narratives” (56). Wandering English players did not perform in theater houses, but at town fairs, royal courts, or schools, thus in contexts where they would have had to compete for spectatorial attention. Given such performative settings, Lande reconstructs the fool’s constitutive role as a theatrical practice. To track the fool within this itinerant and improvisational theatrical culture...

Elogios da razão: Erasmo e a paz incondicional

Erasmus of Rotterdam (circa 1466-1536) was one of the most important figures of the humanistic movement of Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century. In Praise of folly (1511), The war and Complaint of peace (both of 1517), the Dutch author addresses the subject of war, showing armed clashes as absurd, irrational, and making an unconditional defense of the negotiated resolution of conflicts. Frankness, vehemence and, in the case of Praise, humor do not make concessions to the powers of his time. Nobles, priests and intellectuals are equally criticized. By emphatically condemning wars, the writer, translator and theologian occupies a unique place in his time and is the forerunner of modern democracies. The author’s idea of God will also be addressed.

Celebrating the Life of Professor Marcel Storme (1930–2018): A Cathedral Builder in Praise of Folly

Celebrating the Life of Professor Marcel Storme (1930–2018): A Cathedral Builder in Praise of Folly

Epicurean Ethics of Pleasure in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly

Epicurean Ethics of Pleasure in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly

Which Praise of Folly Did the Spanish Censors Read?

Abstract The discovery and subsequent edition of the only known sixteenth-century Spanish translation of The Praise of Folly (which should now be dated ca. 1532–1535) put into question the notion that Erasmus was almost exclusively received as a doctrinal author in sixteenth-century Spain. To bolster this argument, these pages examine the 1536 Spanish translation of Alberto Pio’s Tres et viginti libri locos lucubrationum variarum D. Erasmi Roterodami. Though this translation was not unknown to scholars, none realized that book IV, part 1 included a partial translation, paraphrase, and commentary of the Praise of Folly. Once recognized, this translation allows us more accurately to date the Moria de Erasmo and in turn demands an explanation of why Pio’s lengthy text was translated into Spanish. Moreover, this material helps to explain what texts the Spanish censors had in mind when referring to the “Moria of Erasmus in romance, Latin, and any other language.”