First German “Praise of Folly”

Erasmus von Rotterdam, Desiderius. Das Theür und künstlich Büchlin Morie Encomion das ist, Ein Lob der Thorhait.

€ 28,000.00

First German edition. The best-known of Erasmus's works, "In Praise of Folly" is a biting satire which criticizes all human professions, from monks and theologians to grammarians, poets, and rhetoricians like himself. Erasmus's inversions and double-entendres begin with the title, playing with the name of his friend and host Thomas More, in whose London house he wrote the book, and continue by having a personified Folly tell the tale, so that Folly ridicules folly. Erasmus followed classical models of ironical eulogies by Isocrates, Lucian and Seneca, in its composition, and infused it with Christian Platonism.

The translation is by the German humanist and freethinker Sebastian Franck (1499-1542), whose sympathies with “heretics” led to his imprisonment in Strasbourg in 1531 and subsequent expulsion from that city. In 1534 he settled in Ulm, and published the present work. His edition is augmented with the second German edition of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's "De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio invectiva" (rendered by Franck as "Von der Heillosigkeit, Eitelkeit und Ungewißheit aller menschlichen Künste und Weisheit") as well as the first printing of Franck's own "Von dem Baum des Wissens Gut und Böse, davon Adam den Tod hat gessen". One of two Ulm editions printed in 1534; Bibliotheca Belgica gives priority to the present issue.

Rare, only one copy recorded at auction.