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 insubstantial oeuvre. The first German literary work to demonstrate the mass-market potential of the new printing technology, Das Narrenschiff achieved such unprecedented domestic and international popularity that it has been called the most famous work of German literature before the time of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It provided the archetype for the "Literature of Fools", a genre closely associated with the pedagogical mission of humanism that includes such noted works as the Moriae encomium (1511; translated as The Praise of Folie, 1549), by Desiderius Erasmus, and the Epistolae obscurorum virorum (The Letters of Obscure Men, 1516), by Crotus Rubeanus, Ulrich von Hutten, and others. During the nineteenth century and for much of the...