SOURCE: Classen, Albrecht. “‘Von erfahrung aller land’—Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff: A Document of Social, Intellectual, and Mental History.” Fifteenth-Century Studies 26 (2001): 52-65.

In the following essay, Classen explores what insights The Ship of Fools provides for understanding the daily mental, social, economic, and political conditions of late medieval life.

Talking about Sebastian Brant is like discussing one of the many literary giants within the history of German literature, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Oswald von Wolkenstein, Martin Luther, and Andreas Gryphius.¹ On the one hand, his didactic texts, poems, and narratives invite ever new criticism and analysis because of the breadth and complexity of his poetic works;² on the other, almost every aspect of his texts seems to have been discussed in previous scholarship.³ But since his Narrenschiff, which first appeared in print in 1494, examines, as its title indicates, the entire world and human society on a large scale...