SOURCE: DuBruck, Edelgard E. “On Useless Books and Foolish Studies: Sebastian Brant on Accountability in Education.” Fifteenth-Century Studies 22 (1996): 85-95.

In the following essay, DuBruck examines Brant's attitudes toward books and education.

In his recent monograph (Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools in Critical Perspective. Columbia SC: Camden House, 1993), John Van Cleve asks: “What does The Ship have to offer the modern reader?” (89) and suggests research on its modern relevance. Brant's chapters one and twenty-seven, and even some others, are fraught with significance for those among us who read and study, who teach and have been asked in recent years to justify our activity in terms of objectives and results.¹

The Ship of Fools (1494) presents vices and other foolish behavior in a series of 116 chapters, one for each type of foolishness. It is, according to Ulrich Gaier, a satire of social classes, but it is much more, criticizing, as...