The Praise of Folly

Erasmus (1466-1536) of Rotterdam was Northern Europe’s leader of Renaissance learning. This great Christian humanist and scholar was the founder of the school of thought that anyone who had a good university education and was well-read in literature and theology would be morally virtuous and intellectually disciplined. Erasmus was well-known for his wit, satire and irony and was regarded as one of the best Latin prose stylists since Cicero. His most famous and widely read work, The Praise of Folly , is a dramatic monologue on the futility of all human thought and aspiration. This new Norton Critical Edition of The Praise of Folly also includes selections from his other works such as The Complaint of Peace , The Colloquies and The Abbot and the Learned Lady , and two versions of Erasmus’s foreword to his translation of the New Testament.