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Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly'

74 min • 4 januari 2024

Clare and Colin begin their twelve-part series on satire with the big question: what is satire? Where did it come from? Is it a genre, or more of a style, or an attitude? They then plunge into their first text, The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, a prose satire from 1511 that lampoons pretty much the whole of sixteenth century life in the voice of Folly herself.

Erasmus’s influential work grew partly out of his close friendship with Thomas More, and their shared love of the 2nd century satirist Lucian, but also emerged at a moment (a few years before Luther’s 95 theses) when the worldliness of the Catholic Church could by satirised without necessarily being heretical. Folly’s harshest critiques are levelled at Erasmus’ particularly bugbear, those theologians who resisted humanist reformers (such as Erasmus) who sought to make textually accurate translations of scripture. But she also targets the whole panoply of human weaknesses, arguing (controversially) that not only is folly a necessary human quality that we couldn’t survive without, but that Christianity is folly and Christ himself was a fool.

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