The German writer Sebastian Brant (1457-1521) was the author of the "Narrenschiff," or "Ship of Fools," one of the most famous secular works in European letters. Sebastian Brant, born in Strassburg, lost his father as a child and was reared by his...

The name Sebastian Brant is inextricably tied to Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools, 1494), by far his best-known work. The identities of author and work are so interdependent that literary histories regularly ignore the rest of Brant's not...

The series Literary Criticism in Perspective seeks not just to summarize and assess previous research into important works or authors, but also |to illuminate the nature of literary criticism itself, to gauge the influence of social and historic currents on aesthetic judgments once...

This essay presents a detailed study of eight well-known School of Fontainebleau prints, Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins, etched by Leon Davent after the Franco-Italian artist Luca Penni. Some of Penni's borrowings from earlier graphic works are analyzed, in particular Sebastian Brant's Ship...

In the following essay, Halporn discusses Brant's work as an editor of texts used by law students, which, the critic asserts, he did in part because he believed in making the law accessible to more people so that citizens could serve their own interests more effectively.

In the following essay, Skrine analyzes The Ship of Fools as a commentary on the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes.

In the following essays, Zeydel examines Brant's poetical exercises and broadsides, which the critic argues reveal similar religious and social concerns as those presented in his Latin prose and The Ship of Fools. He also assesses Brant's place in literary history as he presents the principal aspects of Brant's views and works.