Praise of Folly

What It Is

A hundred pages of Latin, written in 1509 and printed in 1511. Erasmus wrote it in about a week at Thomas More's house in London, recovering from the ride over the Alps, largely to amuse his host. The Latin title, Moriae Encomium, is a pun on More's name, and the book is dedicated to him.

The form is a mock encomium, a classical joke borrowed from Lucian: a formal speech of praise delivered on behalf of something that ought not to be praised. Folly herself gives it, in academic dress, from a lectern, to an audience she assumes is on her side.

She is a slippery speaker. She flatters, she contradicts herself, she means it and then she does not, and the reader has to decide at every turn when she is being ironic and about what. That decision is the book. Erasmus never once tells you where he stands.

Why It Matters

It made Erasmus the most famous writer in Europe. It ran through edition after edition in his lifetime, and it worked over the whole apparatus of late medieval religion — the relics, the pilgrimages, the indulgences, the professional theologians, the monks, the bishops, the popes — with a lightness that made it far more dangerous than a denunciation would have been. You cannot burn a joke.

Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched, went the contemporary jibe. Erasmus replied that Luther had hatched a very different bird. Both statements are true, and the tension between them is the reason this book still matters. It is the founding document of Christian humanism: the belief that the church could be repaired from inside, by good Greek, good schools and honest laughter, without breaking anything. Erasmus was wrong about that, and Praise of Folly is what he wrote before he found out.

Everything downstream that wears a mask to tell the truth — Rabelais, Montaigne, Swift, Voltaire, Twain — is working in a tradition this book made respectable.

Before You Read

Two or three hours. Read it in one or two sittings; it is an oration, and it wants to be taken as a performance rather than sipped.

The Latin is dense with classical allusion — Erasmus was showing off for a friend who would catch every reference — and a good edition footnotes it. Do not chase every note. Get the joke and keep moving.

What improves the experience most is a little context on the church of 1511: the trade in indulgences, the relic circuit, the state of the monasteries. Without it, the sharpest passages land as generalities about human vanity rather than the specific, dangerous jokes they were.

Which Translation to Read

• Betty Radice (Penguin Classics, 1971; with introduction and notes by A. H. T. Levi) — recommended. Radice was the best Latinist Penguin ever employed and she catches what most translators miss: the speed and the lightness. Erasmus is funny in her English, which is the whole test. Levi's notes explain the allusions without burying them, and the volume includes the Letter to Maarten van Dorp, Erasmus's own defence of the book, which is worth having. The cost: she smooths some of the rhetorical excess, and the notes assume a classical education you may not have. View on Amazon →
• Clarence H. Miller (Yale University Press, 1979; second edition, Yale Nota Bene, 2003). From the scholar who edited the critical Latin text, and the most reliable English there is; the commentary is the fullest available. The cost: exact rather than funny, and the apparatus is heavy for a hundred-page joke.
• Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton, 1941; reissued with a foreword by Anthony Grafton). The most elegant older version, and its prose still reads beautifully. The cost: dated in places, and the scholarship behind the notes has been overtaken.

Take Radice to laugh, Miller to be certain of what Erasmus actually wrote, Hudson for the pleasure of the English.

Holbein drew marginal sketches in a copy of the 1515 edition, now in Basel. Editions that reproduce them are the ones worth owning: a reminder that this book was passed between friends who were enjoying themselves.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it aloud, or at least hear it. Folly is speaking, and the pleasure is in the timing.

Read Levi's introduction afterwards. It argues a case about how to take the book, and you should form your own view first.

Watch for the moment your own profession comes up. Erasmus goes after lawyers, scholars, writers, teachers and priests in turn, and he intends you to squirm and then keep laughing. If you never squirm, you are reading it as history.

The common mistake is to file it as an early Protestant tract. Erasmus stayed in the church, argued publicly with Luther, and refused to break anything. The book is more interesting than the use later made of it: a devout man's attack on the professionals of devotion, written by someone who had not yet given up on them.