|
Dromo's Den
|
|
[Up] [Dromo's Den] Sebastian Brant Biography BRANT, or BRANDT, bränt, Sebastian (c.1458–1521). A German satirist and humanist. He was born in Strassburg, the son of a wealthy burgher. He studied philosophy and jurisprudence at the University of Basel, taught and practiced law there, and removed to Strassburg, where he became town clerk in 1501, in which office he served his native city well till his death. From Emperor Maximilian he received a title and a pension. He took an important part in negotiations with the Holy See. Brant achieved fame through his satirical poem, Das Narrenschiff ('The Ship of Fools'), published in 1494, one of the most remarkable and popular books of the time. The dialect is Alsatian and the form the short-rhymed couplet. The Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff) is supposed to have suggested Erasmus' famous Praise of Folly and was a sort of Pilgrim's Progress to its generation. It was a mirror to those perplexed times, and in Locker's Latin translation it was carried far beyond the borders of Germany. Neither the fiction of the ship nor the treatment of it was entirely new, but the great popularity of the book came perhaps from the very general character of the satire scourging alike real sin and innocent error, from the fortunate placing of the numerous and pointed woodcuts, and from the many well-chosen quotations from Scripture and from Latin authors. He invites to passage in his "Ship of Fools" representatives of every class—the misers, the gluttons, the churchgoers for show and the churchgoers for respectability, the pedantic and the frivolous, "from beardless youth to crooked age," knights and ladies, cooks and butlers, gamesters, drunkards, spendthrifts, merchants, alchemists, and lovers, in motley and ever-changing throng. So all classes saw themselves in his picture and read with a twinge at their own and a smile at others' folly, "the first printed book that dealt with contemporary events and living persons, instead of old German battles and French knights" (Max Müller). But Brant was no poet, nor did he have much milk of human kindness in his chastisement of poor mortals. Contemporary writers made constant allusions to it; monks preached from its texts; fifteen years after its appearance it was done into English by Barclay (London, 1509), and again by Henry Watson, as The Grete Shyppe of Fooles of the Worlde (1517). Barclay's edition bas been edited by Jamieson (Edinburgh, 1874). The best German editions are by Zarncke (Leipzig, 1854), with an extensive commentary, and popular editions by Goedecke (Leipzig, 1872) and Bobertag in Kürschner's Nationallitteratur. Consult Claus, Rhythmik und Metrik in Sebastian Brants Narrenschiff (Strassburg, 1911). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. III (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 673. . |