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Until the mid 1960s, scholarship on The Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant was characterised by a kind of academic schizophrenia. For decade after decade, one obstinate underlying question failed to elicit a satisfying answer: How could a supposedly disorganized, soporific sermon in wooden verse have been so wildly popular for well over a century throughout most of Europe? It was Gervinus who first saw the ambivalence suggested in the dichotomy of quality - popularity as a tension between external form and inner worth. He set a trend when he excused what he thought to be mediocre form by placing the poem in a time of supposed insensitivity to considerations of literary conventions and poetic language. Van Cleve traces scholarship on The Ship of Fools through the methodological developments of modern Germanics and suggests directions for future work. In the process he analyzes attacks on and defenses of the work that have much to say about their authors' perceptions of literature and of their own societies, and about the transformations that the field of Germanics was undergoing.VAN CLEEVE is Professor of German at Mississippi State University. He has published numerous articles on German literature of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and he has written four books, most recently (with A. Leslie Willson) Remarks of the Needed Reform of German Studies in the United States. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Europe, 1450 to 1789: An Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 788 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Explores European history from 1450-1789, from the print revolution to the French Revolution. Includes articles written by eminent scholars covering major topics in art, government, and education as well as providing biographical entries on key figures of the period. Also covers topics specific to the era, such as apocalypticism, guilds, food riots, royal mistresses and lovers, the Spanish Inquisition, Utopia and others. ... Read more