The Praise of Folly

By his own account, Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch monk and scholar, wrote his 1509 Latin prose masterpiece, The Praise of Folly , "in seven days, more or less" while a guest at the London home of his friend and fellow humanist, Sir Thomas More. Friends with whom Erasmus shared his manuscript arranged its publication in Paris in 1511 in an unauthorized edition. Erasmus, surprised but pleased by the immediate popularity of the work, revised it seven times, with thirty-six editions appearing during h