This was very interesting. It is a work of satire and criticizes the Catholic Church. It is notoriously difficult to analyze. So I chose to simply enjoy it. Some have said it led to the Protestant Reformation.
I like that he was a dear friend of Sir Thomas More. There is much I liked about this book, and there is more I didn't really understand!
Waspish, subversive, bitingly ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Praise of Folly has endured for five hundred years as a masterpiece of humanistic inquiry and opposition to dogmatism. The book begins as a straight satire. Folly, in the guise of a jester, speaks for herself in a parodic declamation, insisting she is the world’s greatest benefactor—desire, flattery, youth, and vitality all follow her lead, and Jupiter himself has to fall in behind her when he wants to father a child. When someone observes that no humans have ever built a house of worship for her, Folly first responds with a droll observation: “I cannot but wonder at the ingratitude.” Yet Praise of Folly soon pivots from this cheeky beginning, and the goddess becomes a mouthpiece through which the author propounds more serious themes. Half a millennium on, the power of Erasmus’s masterpiece has not waned; in fact, it’s both disturbingly and providentially relevant in our contemporary moment, when religious belief and humanistic scrutiny are often violently opposed.
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