Book Fools: Satire and Reform in Elizabethan London
The famous woodcut of the “book fool” from Sebastian Brant’s popular satirical catalogue of human follies was first published in 1494. This risible figure, dressed in a foolscap of nine bells and armed with a feather duster, has also equipped himself with thick spectacles that magnify his wondering eyes but are not meant for reading. “By often brushing and much diligence,” the foppish bibliophile merely tends the luxuriously bound books in his library as though they were so many exotic and precious orchids simply to behold, each “full goodly bound in pleasant coverture, of damask, satin, or else velvet pure.” Brant’s text captures in verse the age-old caricature of the bibliomane as one who collects precious and expensive books without ever reading them, showing little or no real interest in any of the wisdom they may contain:
“Lo in likewise of books I have store,
But few I read, and fewer understand,
I follow not their doctrine nor their lore,
It is enough to bear a book in hand:
It were too much to be in such a band,
For to be bound to folly within the book,
I am content on the fair covering to look.”
This somewhat clunky English verse translation from the Latin first appeared from the London press of Richard Pynson in 1509. It was originally the work of the colorful, if not positively Chaucerian, figure of Alexander Barclay, a Catholic priest turned Benedictine monk, who then turned Franciscan friar. More than a quarter-century after his translation, the conservative Barclay refused to abandon his religious habit (even as late as 1538) despite the ongoing storm of Henry VIII’s Reformation and the violent dissolution of the monasteries.
Brant’s own original source text for the book fool was the ancient Hellenistic Greek satire on “The Ignorant Book Collector” written by Lucian of Samosata, whose works enjoyed a great vogue in later fifteenth-century reform-minded humanist circles. Lucian’s caricature pulls few punches, ridiculing the bibliomane all the way back in the age of scrolls, predating even the advent of the codex. While “the scroll that you hold in your hands is very beautiful, with a slipcover of purple vellum and a gilt knob,” this finery cannot conceal how the ignorant book collector can easily “barbarize its language” and “spoil its beauty and warp its meaning” the moment he may attempt to parrot, or presume to comprehend, the text itself.
With little sympathy, and perhaps a touch of envy toward men with greater access to important works of literature than himself, Lucian asked, in scandalized tones: “What expectation do you base upon your books that you are always unrolling them and rolling them up, gluing them, trimming them, smearing them with saffron and oil of cedar, putting slipcovers on them, and fitting them with knobs, just as if you were going to derive some profit from them?” “Two things can be acquired from the ancients,” Lucian wrote didactically, “the ability to speak and to act as one ought, by emulating the best models and shunning the worst; and when a man clearly fails to benefit from them either in the one way or in the other, what else is he doing but buying haunts for mice and lodgings for worms, and excuses to thrash his servants for negligence?” Mystified by the material delights of the bibliophile, Lucian confessed:
“I have never yet been able to discover why you have shown so much zeal in the purchase of books. Nobody who knows you in the least would think that you do it on account of their helpfulness or use, any more than a bald man would buy a comb, or a blind man a mirror, or a deaf-mute a flute-player, or a eunuch a concubine, or a landsman an oar, or a seaman a plough. But perhaps you regard the matter as a display of wealth and wish to show everyone that out of your vast surplus you spend money even for things of no use to you?”
Barclay’s translation of this extremely popular illustrated work was reprinted with copies of the original woodcuts in an Elizabethan edition by John Cawood in 1570. By then Cawood had just recently stepped down from the mastership of the London trade guild of printers, the Worshipful Company of Stationers, where he still served as a member of its governing Court of Assistants. Around that year Cawood also donated funds to purchase a fine door for the livery company’s building near the southern end of the churchyard of St. Paul’s cathedral—the urban epicenter of the London book trade throughout the Elizabethan period.
For a man of Cawood’s experience and standing as a London stationer, such an undertaking as this luxuriously illustrated publication of over one hundred woodcuts would not have been at- tempted lightly. Nor was it produced for merely antiquarian interest. Anti-Catholic sentiment had perhaps never run higher during Elizabeth’s initial decades as queen than in the year this book was printed, for on February 25, 1570, she had been formally condemned by the pope as a “pretended” monarch and heretic, and her Catholic subjects freed from all bonds of allegiance to her, effectively calling for open rebellion.
The universality of Brant’s original leveling social criticism, allied with his and Barclay’s early humanist skepticism toward medieval (and thus Roman Catholic) curricula, would have found a sympathetic audience in a firmly Protestantized London by 1570. Barclay had remained a committed Catholic at the time of his original 1509 translation of the Ship of fooles, and his work preceded the first serious effects of the Reformation in England by decades. Nevertheless, Protestant readers in 1570 might well have read into Barclay’s own brand of pre-Reformation anticlericalism—specifically, his denunciation of secular parish priests as venal and anti-intellectual—a welcome presaging of, even a warm welcome to, greater religious reforms to come.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Albrecht Classen, “‘Von erfahrung aller land’—Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff: A Document of Social, Intellectual, and Mental History,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 26 (2001), 52–65; Robert C. Evans, “Forgotten Fools: Alexander Barclay’s Ship of Fools,” Early Drama, Art, and Manuscript Monograph Series 22 (1996), 47–72; Joachim Knape, “Der Medien-Narr. Zum ersten Kapitel von Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff,” in Klaus Bergoldt (ed.), Sebastian Brant und die Kommunikationskultur um 1500 (Harrassowitz Verlag in Kommission, 2010), 253–72.
