Whose Utopia is it anyway? – some brief reflections on the inherent vice of the ideal society

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951), presumably showing the country's coat of arms

For several years I have been fascinated with the various forms of Utopian societies and how they have been imagined by writers through the centuries. As a general rule, I hold that a Utopian narrative is interesting mainly for what it can reveal about its author, and not so much for what it can offer for the sundry societal ills of our own time. Indeed, the majority of the Utopian societies I have read about are practically dictatorships where one person’s preferences and pet peeves have a disproportionate impact on people of different tastes and views. Such an impact becomes all the more problematic in those cases where the Utopian society in question is described in minute detail, something which inevitably makes the whole narrative a catalogue of the author’s obsessions and blind spots. In most cases, these blind spots highlight that the creators of these Utopian societies predominantly are not women – with some notable exceptions such as Margaret Cavendish – and so there are several problems affecting mainly or only women that are either not dealt with or that are dealt with immensely poorly. For instance, I do not recall having read any Utopian narrative that addresses problems such as domestic violence or rape, or admit to the possibility that such crimes might occur in any given society. This is just one of the elements which show to what extent Utopian narratives are predominantly about the critique and lampooning of a select bundle of issues, and not a literary genre that can provide much practical guidance. It is also one of the elements which suggest that an author of a Utopian narrative very rarely ought to be in a position of power. Quite the opposite, I argue that one way to keep people away from power would be to ask them to describe their own idea of a Utopian society, and then have the atrocious ones disbarred from any future participation in the government.

Title woodcut from a sixteenth-century edition of Thomas More's Utopia

Courtesy of Wikimedia

It is both impractical, unrealistic and, to be frank, completely undesirable to make use of Utopian narratives as wholesale guidebooks to how a society should be organised, above all because of how the faulty ideas of the creators tend to bleed into the very structures and foundations of these imagined perfect societies. As an example, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) relies on slave labour, and even though these are criminals and soldiers from other countries taken prisoners in war, the very existence of a slave class shows that even the prototype of all later Utopias has something very rotten at its core. Granted, More does say at the end of his book that he does not agree with all aspects of Utopian society, but I find little reason to think that the use of slave labour is one of those aspects.

Another example can be found in Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), where the Utopian state practices extensive eugenics and consequently does not operate with the concept of love and infatuation. It therefore is of little use that both More and Campanella criticise very severe problems of the respective societies in which they themselves lived, because they have allowed other types of problems to be an integral part of their imagined ideal societies. In other words, Utopian narratives can provide excellent vehicles for identifying individual societal problems and even identify the main causes, but because these narratives are the products of individual authors it is no wonder that the Utopias usually fall short of providing any real solutions. Hence the question in the title of this blogpost: Whose Utopia is it anyway?   

Utopias are not always political, however, and often the name Utopia takes on the meaning of a kind of paradisiacal society where it is the sensual rather than the logical which serves as the linchpin. Such imaginary societies predate the publication of More’s Utopia by centuries, and they are an important part of medieval satirical culture. One of the most famous of these societies is the Land of Cockaigne, where everything is made of food and the very raison d’etre appears to be gastronomical excess. Then there is the land of Cornucopia mentioned in Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1353) (day 8, third story), which can count among its distinctive geological features a mountain made of parmesan cheese. Stories such as these are often interpreted as a kind of earthly counterpart to Paradise, where it is the stomach rather than the soul which is rewarded, but they can also be employed to lampoon the base and myopic desires of those who are more concerned with earthly gain than spiritual gain, and are unable to see beyond the diameter of their own stomachs. An example of this is the island of Narragonia, situated just beyond Spain, which is the destination of the eponymous vessel in Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494).

Enter Plutopia

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

These two different types of societies – the political Utopia and the sensual paradise – are often overlapping or mixed together in modern popular culture, where the name Utopia can easily be used as a shorthand for a paradise not in Heaven. One such case from the twentieth century is the Disney short Plutopia from 1951, as seen in the illustration above, and it was this cartoon that prompted me to reflect on the inherent vice of ideal societies, namely that– with few exceptions such as Potu in Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Journey Under Ground (1741) – they rarely benefit every individual and rarely function without the suffering of others. While the cartoon is not, and does not set out to be, a political commentary, it nonetheless serves as an example of this fundamental flaw of Utopias where the well-being of some depends on others paying a significant price for that well-being.  

The cartoon relies on the paradisiacal connotations of Utopia, rather than the social connotations. In other words, the name of More’s ideal society is here used as a shorthand for a land devoid of trouble and problems. This is demonstrated very clearly throughout the cartoon, as Mickey and Pluto travel to Camp Utopia, the sportman’s paradise. Already here we see that this particular kind of paradise necessitates the potential suffering of others – a trait mainly of the political Utopia – while we also see that the focus is on the gastronomical pleasures of the sensual paradise of medieval literature. When Mickey and Pluto arrive, Pluto picks a fight with a cat, but when the cabin rules dictate that Pluto be kept on a leash and given a muzzle, the cat enacts his revenge by eating the dog’s food and sleeping in his place. This leads Pluto to wander off into his dreams, in which he is brought to Plutopia, and although the cartoon does not at all suggest it, I consider this to serve, in effect, as a subversion of the medieval dream vision whereby the heavenly Paradise has been accessed. This, I suspect, is an occupational injury that comes with being a medievalist.

Welcome to Camp Utopia

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Plutopia is a dog’s sensual paradise, symbolised by the plethora of fire hydrants and bones, and because it is a paradise serving the needs and desires of dogs, it also contains a cat servant, who in this case happens to be the cat who ate Pluto’s food at Camp Utopia. This feline fellow is excessively servile, and demands to be bitten as punishment for tripping and losing a delicious bowl of cream. Although Pluto at first hesitates, he soon becomes accepting of this punishment, because in return for these bites the cat gives him food in overabundance, feeding him by the bedside in exchange for a painful nibble on the tail. Eventually, Pluto wakes up, Mickey finds the two animals sleeping together on the porch, and so he remarks that this is truly is a Utopia, with a nod to the image of Paradise as a place where the lamb and the lion, sworn enemies, lie down together.

A dog's paradise

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

We've struck bones!

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

The royal hall of Plutopia

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

What fascinates me about this cartoon is precisely how it manages – despite not even trying to do so – to showcase one of the most important faults in any ideal society, the existence of potentially violently exacted hierarchies. The nature of such hierarchies differs from case to case, and the sadistic demarcation line between the classes is rarely, if ever, a feature of Utopian societies – rather, they appear in dystopian fantasies of forgotten and debauched civilisations. However, Pluto’s punishment of the cat for his own gastronomical benefits – which is hardly a punishment since nothing is actually being punished – does serve as a reminder that ideal societies tend to be impossible not only because of how radically they reimagine reality, but also, and primarily, because they are ideal societies to a minority of one, i.e. their creator. This inherent vice is something shared by most Utopias, whether they are imagined as a critical mirror of sixteenth-century England or just the vengeful dreams of a hungry dog.

A second or third breakfast in bed

Screenshot from the Disney short Plutopia (1951)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Het Luilekkerland (1567), Alte Pinakothek, München

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Brexit, Featherbeds and the Land of Cockaigne

I try not to be overly political on this blog, and I hesitate to use it as a platform for voicing my opinion on various political issues. This is mostly because my blog is intended to focus on research, academia, engagements with cultures of the past, and also to share the many beautiful and curious things I come across in my professional and also my personal life.

In this particular blogpost, however, I will be talking politics, and I will talk about the recent political farce which is commonly known as Brexit, the campaign that - successfully - urged for the UK to leave the European Union. The results were clear on Friday 24, the morning after the votes for the referendum had been cast, and I and several of my friends grieved tremendously for this result. Many of my friends are academics whose lives depend very much on the financial support from the European Union, and who are now facing a very uncertain future. Furthermore, the centre at which I work - the Centre for Medieval Literature - is a cooperation between the University of Southern Denmark and the University of York, a cooperation that has been possible because of the close ties between Denmark and the UK as members of the Union.

I will not go in great detail about why Brexit is a catastrophic farce. This has been done better elsewhere, such as here, here, here, here, and many other places. What angers me most in all this, is the way in which the British public has been manipulated and how they have been fed promises which leading Brexiteers then the very next day went back on. The result of the referendum came about in part through exploitation of fear and in part by way of promising a future which was claimed to be more financially secure. In a way, the Leave campaign painted a picture of this future in ways similar to what we find in Pieter Brueghel's painting below.

Het Luilekkerland, or the land of lazy-lucious

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1567

Courtesy of Wikimedia

In the history of European culture, we find many expressions of a materialistic paradise, an impossible country which satisfies the stomach and which abounds in a never-ceasing supply of food and drink. This place is sometimes known as the Land of Cockaigne, or as Schluraffenland, the land of lazy apes. It is found in Boccaccio's Decameron, day 8, third story, in which the poor painter Calandrino is dazzled by prospects of a materialistic paradise whose wonders include a mountain of parmesan cheese. We might also see a remnant of this, and also a subversion of the topos, in the description of the witch's house in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, which like the architecture typical to Cockaigne is edible.

A somewhat similar day-dreaming permeated the Leave campaign. Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and the rest of the  Brexiteers tapped into a pool of anxieties among the elderly, among the less well-educated and among people living in cities without many prospects for the future. They played on a rising and poorly suppressed xenophobia, they nurtured a Euro-scepticism that sometimes seem to have been turned to hate, and they were very careless about facts. One of the two main promises of the Leave campaign was that immigration would be severely reduced, a promise which pandered to xenophobia and racism, which has now unleashed a load of nasty attacks on British citizens and guest workers, and which was then severely modified by Daniel Hannan the day after the referendum.

Borish Johnson and the non-promise of the 350 million pounds

Copyright Getty Images

Courtesy of The Daily Mail

Nigel Farage goes back on his promise

The second main carrot applied by the Leave campaign was the suggestion, as seen in the picture above, that the membership contingent sent to the EU should rather be spent on the National Health Service. This contingent was presented systematically as numbering 350 million pounds weekly, a number which was from the very start incorrect since it didn't take into account the rebate, i.e. what Britain received back from the EU in subsidies and funding. The anatomy of this scam was wonderfully explained by John Oliver recently. The bottom line is that there never was a 350-million-a-week sum to be had in the first place, and yet this number became the very symbol of what financial glories would await should Britain leave the European Union.

The very morning of the referendum result, Friday 24th of June, Nigel Farage stated in an interview on Good Morning Britain, as seen above, that he could not guarantee that this sum would be spent on the NHS. To add insult to injury, he furthermore stated that it was a mistake to make that promise in the first place - and he said that he himself never did make it - and that it Leave voters should not have voted because of this. As pointed out by Susanna Reid in the interview, this sum might have been a strong motivator for many voters, and she brilliantly showcased just how mendacious the Leave campaign had been.

What is particularly distressing, however, is to see the look on Nigel Farage's face when he defends himself with the claim that there will be "a ten-billion-a-year, a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-a day featherbed" to spend on whatever the country pleased. It actually does seem that Farage believes in this foolish fantasy, and he appears to have glimpsed by this number a short view of this materialist paradise that is the Land of Cockaine.

The ship of fools sails to Narragonia

Woodcut from Das Narrenschyff, Sebastian Brant, 1494

Courtesy of Wikimedia

The fantasies of Nigel Farage and the whole Leave campaign brings to mind another version of the topos of the land of overflowing, namely the motif of the ship of fools. This motif received its name and its most brilliant formulation in Sebastian Brant's satirical book-length poem Das Narrenschyff from 1494. The main conceit of this book is that all the fools of the earth - each type described in detailed in the various episodes of the poem - are embarking on a ship bound for Narragonien, or Narragonia, a kingdom of fools.

This is not to say that all Leave voters are fools. Although I think all of them made the completely wrong choice, I do not intend to insult their intelligence - at least not all of them. However, all, or at least most of the Leave voters were fooled. They were fooled by phantom numbers, by already-broken promises and by fear and greed. They were shown an imaginary featherbed of 350 million pounds a week to secure the health system - a prospect particularly appealing to the older segments of society, the majority of which voted Leave - and this featherbed will turn out to be non-existent.

The Leave campaign was a fraud from the very beginning, a ship of fools that is now driving the UK away from its ties with Europe, and which is making life difficult for millions of Brits and non-British residents in the UK. There are problems with the European Union, certainly, but the answer is not to defraud millions of people for misguided and imaginary gains.

Stultifera Navis, Jakob Locher's translation of Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschyff,

Strassburg, 1497

Courtesy of Wikimedia

Bibliography

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated by G. H. McWilliam, Penguin Classics, 1971 (reissued in 2003)

Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, translated by Edwin Zeydel, 1964

Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands, translated by Alastair McEwen, MacLehose Press, 2013


Similar blogposts

On the ship of fools in early modern culture

Notes on productive procrastination

Nick, this is not life experience, this is procrastination at the zoo.
- Winston Bishop, New Girl S02E09

One day, probably in 2012 while I was in my last year of my MA studies I overheard a student telling another student about the word procrastinate, except she called it "procrastrinate", and this novel information was received with what seemed to be amusement and perhaps also recognition. I consider this to be one of the most emblematic encounters I have had with student culture and its early 2010s zeitgeist. This is not to say that I consider my fellow students not to work hard - in fact most students probably work harder than I did during my MA - but at this time "procrastination" had become an emblem of academia, a household term, as it were. This was in no small part thanks to the popularity of PhD Comics, which despite being set in the sciences also resonated with the everyday life of students in the humanities. I remember several print-outs from this comic strip taped to the doors of the cubicles designated for MA students, and Facebook was full of links and updates. In a sense, procrastination appeared to be not only accepted but also expected of someone who wished to take part in the life of higher education. To me, at least, an ambitious MA student with hopes of advancing in the system, it seemed that I was obliged to spend time not being productive, and this was adopted into my MA studies quite early on. For me this was quite easy as both some of my friends and myself had often spent time socialising while we ought to have been working on our dissertation. The first term of the MA in particular, the autumn of 2010, we usually had two-hour breaks with short bouts of research thrown in between. We were already good at procrastination, although it was not until 2011, I believe, that we started to fully embrace the concept or to put the precise word to our way of not working. Around this time, when we adopted the culture of procrastination, it seemed as if many people did the same. This is only natural, as most people will probably have experienced that when you learn a new word you find significant, you suddenly start noticing this word all around you, as if the whole world was also having the same discovery.  

Tomorrow, tomorrow! the crows cry
Woodcut illustration from Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, attributed to Albrecht Dürer
Courtesy of University of Houston

The central place of procrastination in academia is only natural. Much of the day of an MA or PhD student is spent in a small room perusing books or writing stuff on a computer. There is a certain monotony in this that invites escapism of sundry sorts, and if the day happens to be a bit unstructured, or if the progress is hampered by things like faulty or quarrelsome technology or books that are not as helpful as you had hoped, it is easy to fall into procrastination mode. There are various ways to go about this procrastination, and it is frightfully easy to find reasons to do so. In some cases, faux reasoning does not even get a chance to play its part, as it is also easy to merely descend into ennui while staring at your computer screen, blindly giving in to postponement and letting time pass you buy. Other times, you get a helping hand from fellow procrastinators who pick you up into its fold, and with whom you pick up others to form what Jorge Cham has termed the Vortex of Unproductivity.

Courtesy of Jorge Cham

Although it is terribly easy to give in to the sweet allures of procrastination, there are also ways to avoid it, or at the very least procrastinate in a way that is not entirely unproductive. One of the easiest ways to do this if you procrastinate with others is to turn your bacchanalia of not-working into an academic discussion of some kind. Most likely it will not be entirely relevant to your current research, but since it is always good for academics to root around a bit beyond their immediate concerns, such a discussion can be a good way to engage critically with something. If you are procrastinating in your office and left to your own devices, it can seem slightly more difficult to avoid the clutches of non-productivity, but only apparently. One of the tools to escape this is Twitter, either by entering into a discussion with members of its growing academic community, or by tweeting about your latest research that you are currently not doing. As a medievalist it is particularly easy to choose this route, as the medievalist section of Twitter is full of bright and interesting people and also has an interested lay audience, both of whom might be receptive to your reflections on some medieval topic. I for my part spent some of my procrastination time today tweeting about Saint Remigius, the apostle of the Franks, whose feast day is October 1st. This led me to rediscover parts of his legend that are somewhat relevant to my work, and it also allowed me to track down a few great medieval illuminations to attach to my tweets. While Remigius is both temporally and geographically far removed from my own focus on 12th-century Northern European cult of royal saints, he is nonetheless an important figure in the religious history of high-medieval France and its mythology of kingship. Remigius therefore makes for a good point of reference in the construction of sacred kingship, and my bout of procrastination became surprisingly akin to actual research.

An even better way - and I would argue the best way - to be productive while procrastinating is simply to read. This is not to say that any reading is productive procrastination, far from it, but for a medievalist - especially - there is a vast range of literature that can in some ways qualify as research. Academics are required to read widely in order to increase their horizon, and for scholars immersing themselves in the worldview of a culture separated from ours by centuries, it is particularly important to be aware of the complexity and the cultural heritage of that period. Furthermore, a medievalist should be interdisciplinary, so if you are tired of your own part of the field of medieval studies, it is easy enough to pick up an article or a blogpost that touches on medieval history but in a way different from your own. And if this seems too similar to actual work, it's easy enough to find a medieval text that might be far beyond your immediate research interest, but that still might give you some interesting knowledge that you might be able to employ later. Today, for instance, I indulged in Jerome's highly interesting account of Paul of Thebes. Since this is one of the oldest saint biographies, and one which concerns such a central figure in medieval history as Anthony of Egypt, it is a text with which I was required to be familiar. Carolinne White's excellent translation combined with its blissful brevity made it a quick read that also opened up for some reflections of themes such as the monastic renunciation of the world, or the various forms of suffering found in Christian martyrdoms. In other words: what started out as procrastination turned out to be some kind of productivity, and I came away with a clearer conscience.  

Anthony meeting the centaur
Francesco Guarino, 17th century
Courtesy of this website

The Mystery of the Maastricht Monkeys, part II - The Ship of Fools

Laughter abounds in the mouth of the fool

- Latin proverb (my translation)

For fools a mirror shall it be

Where each his counterfeit may see

- The Ship of Fools, Sebastian Brant (translated by Edwin Zeydel)

Frontispiece to The Ship of Fools, Master of Hainz Narr, courtesy of this website

In the previous blogpost I took as my starting point an illumination, shown below, from the early 14th-century book of hours MS. Stowe 17, examining its execution in view of the beast-fable tradition of medieval literature, reaching back into the mid-11th century and going up to the 14th. In this instalment, I wish to look at another literary tradition - the topos of the ship of fools - and contemplate this illumination as a possible precursor to this topos. This is not to say that I postulate a direct connection between the illumination and the ship of fools; I do not believe such connections can easily be established and I will not attempt it here. However, what I seek to do is to position this illumination at the onset of a tradition that informed Sebastian Brant's satire Das Narrenschyff, or The Ship of Fools, from 1494, suggesting that the same current which informed this illumination may have laid the groundwork for what later grew into a clearly discernible literary topos of its own. To do this, I will first bridge the gap between the early 14th-century illumination and Brant's satire by giving an overview of literary influences from the 14th century and up to 1494. I will then explain the concept of the ship of fools topos, and afterward conclude with some summary remarks.

Again I want to thank Johan Oosterman and Sarah J. Biggs for their invaluable contributions to this blogpost.

MS. Stowe 17, early 14th century, Liège, courtesy of British Library (with thanks to Sarah)

Background - Early 14 century to 1494

Medieval satire often attacked, and sometimes sought to redress, various vices termed as follies, and this was, as Edwin Zeydel points out, a commonplace in medieval literature (1). What constituted such behaviour could vary according to the author's emphasis. Nigel Wireker's late-12th-century Speculum Stultorum, the Mirror of Fools, specifically targeted ambitious and hypocritical clerics, while Fiore di virtù - attributed to Tommaso Leoni and adapted by Hans Vintner in 1411 as Pluemen der Tugend - made a showcase of several types of fools.

The archetypal fool was of course the Biblical fool referred to in psalms 14 and 53 who "saith in his heart, there is no God", and at the medieval court the jester's bauble - his "rod of office (...) carved with an elaborate head with the ears of an ass" (2) - was a stark contrast to the king's rod and sceptre, making the jester akin to a mirror image of the wise king of medieval kingship, based on the rex sapiens of Proverbs and Wisdom (3).

Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus
MS. Hague KB78D38, 15th century, with thanks to Erik Kwakkel

Fool in yellow, with thanks to Johan Oosterman

Medieval kingship contributed another counterpart to the fool, namely the king who dared humiliate himself in the eyes of God like King David had done when he stripped naked and danced, mocked by his wife Michal (2. Sam. 6:20). This was frolicking of a pious kind, and stood in contrast to the insipid revelry of the fool.

David and Fool, MS. Egerton 2652, France, 2nd or 3rd quarter of 13th century, courtesy of British Library

Medieval satirists employed various conceits to convey their message, and an important conceit was the foundation of a religious order, comprising foolish clergy. This occurs both in Speculum Stultorum and John Lydgate's Order of Fools, and although both Wireker and Lydgate were English, it is believed that the latter brought this conceit back into England via France (4). Lydgate ordered his satire as a "catalogue of isolated traits" (5) and made a showcase of them, much in the manner of Brant's 1494 satire. Sebastian Brant, however, allegedly knew neither of these works (6), but they are both important stepping stones in the tradition which later burgeoned into the Ship of Fools.

While Wireker and Lydgate placed their fools in cloistered communities, other satires employed the conceit of the ship freighting a merry band of delinquents and Zeydel remarks that "the idea of placing careless livers, rakes, drinkers, and the like together upon a ship was widespread from Holland to Austria before Brant's time" (7). How the image of a ship became used in this fashion is a matter of some contention. Early critics of Brant's Narrenschyff probably drew on a false etymology when they conjectured that it might stem from carnival floats, which did transport "various types of comical or fantastic characters", yet not solely in the guise of ships but also wagons and other types of vessels (8). It may also be that the image of a ship of fools served as an inversion of the Ship of God, i.e. the Church.

Prefatory vignette, courtesy of this website

The idea of a host of fools brought together in a ship and setting off for a promised land of their own, appeared in several satirical works of the Later Middle Ages. This paradise of fools had roots in the Goliardic poetry, and one the early-14th-century Kildare poems satirises over the corrupt monks living in luxury in the land of Cockayne. This conceit entered the various languages of Western Christendom. In German the land was known as Schluraffenland or Schlauraffenland (rendered in modern Norwegian as Slaraffenland), in French Pays de Cocaygne, in Italian Cuccagna and in Holland it was known as dat edele Lant van Cockaenghen (9).

The paradise of fools as imagined by Pieter Brueghel the Elder: Het Luilekkerland, 1567

Having considered the destination of the ship, it is time to say a bit more about the ship itself as a tradition of medieval satirical imagery. One example close to the date of the Maastricht illumination is the Renart-le-Nouvel, the new Reynard, a late-13th-century continuation of the Reynard Romance by the Flemish troubadour Jacquemars Giélée which retained significant popularity into the 16th century (10). Here the ship metaphor is merely suggested (11), but later works featured it more heavily. An important example is the Austrian Heinrich der Teichner's satire Das Schif der Flust from c.1360, which tells of a ship filled with gamblers, adulterers and the like sailing from Linz (12). Their destination is Hungary, not an imaginary realm, but the conceit is the same as later used by Sebastian Brant.

The ship laden with moral outcasts continued into 15th-century literature and appeared in Jacob van Oestvoren's Die Blauwe Schute, a Dutch Shrovetide verse from 1413. Here it is stated that Ende alle ghesellen van wilde manieren / (...) Te comen in die Blauwe Scuut (all the wild lads come with you in the blue ship - my translation) (13). Parsons and Jongenelen states that this blue ship is probably based on the carts of Dutch Shrovetide plays (14). It is also interesting to note that Pieter van der Heyden - emulating Hieronymus Bosch - gave The Blue Ship as the title for his 1559 rendition of this topos.

Hieronymus Bosch, c.1490-1510, from wikimedia commons

Pieter van der Heyden, 1559, from wikimedia commons

However, Edwin Zeydel identifies some lesser known sources as the more immediate antecedents for Brant's satire. The probably oldest of these is the anonymous Die acht Schalkheiten (c.1450) which comprised eight woodcuts with rhyming texts (15). Next in the chronological order is a sermon from the 1460s or 1470s which treats dem geistlichen narrenshiff, i.e. the clerical ship of fools, held on St. Ursula's day and therefore nicely contrasted with the saint's iconic ship (16). Two more immediate sources are Felix Hemmerlin's Doctoratus in stultitia, which Brant himself edited (17), and finally the academic humorous oration Monopolium et societas vulgo des Lichtschiffs, held by Jodocus Gallus in Heidelberg late in the 1480s and published in Strassburg in 1489 at the behest of one of Brant's friends. This oration appears to have drawn from both Teichner and van Oestvoren (18), and it is through this work we finally arrive in 1494 by the time of Brant's own satire.

Cart and boat, courtesy of this website

The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant

Sebastian Brant (1457-1521) was born in Strassburg and educated at the University of Basel, an important centre for humanism. He became a teacher and practicioner of canon law, and later entered the realm of book-printing (19). In 1494 he wrote his most famous work, The Ship of Fools, a satire on various fools and expounds in humorous detail the ways in which they err and miss the mark. The satire is described as a compilation of what may have been fliegenblätter, leaflets, focussed on one particular topic and here bound together in one unit (20). The book is divided into 112 chapters, each introduced by a woodcut vignette depicting the foible specific to the chapter (although sometimes the same woodcuts are used for two chapters). In the prologue he devises how he would equip a vessel to gather up the many fools of the world, commenting snidingly that one ship would not be sufficient due to their great number. The ship imagery itself, however, recurs fairly seldom - only in chapters 48, 75, 103, 108 and 109 - and this strengthens the supposition that many of the chapters were written prior to the application of this conceit.

Of Bad Marksmen, chapter 75 (courtesy of this website)

Brant's satire is rife with humanistic ideal, and irreligion and contempt of wisdom are some of the most frequent targets for his verbal barrages. The first chapter, for instance, is dedicated to fools who collect books they do not understand, and feign learning by replacing certain native phrases with Latin ones. Sebastian Brant is, however, not a distant judge. He acknowledges his own folly and dedicates chapter 111 to the poet's apology, judging himself the way he judges others.

Of Heedless Fools, chapter 12 (courtesy of this website)

In Brant's contemporary language there were many words for fools, such as narr, tore, affe, esel and gouch (21). This diversity in nomenclature can be said to be reflected in the wide variety of fools inhabiting Brant's satire, and he ruminates on such subjects as teaching of children (chapter 6), taking offense at fools (chapter 40), dancing (chapter 60) and gamblers (chapter 77) to mention only a few. Despite this diversity, however, the fools aboard the ship have some important aspects in common: they are all fools, although their foolery comes in various guises, and they are all dressed to emphasise this.

My ears are covered up for me,

If they were not, an ass I'd be

- The Ship of Fools (chapter 26), Sebastian Brant (transl. by Edwin Zeydel)

However, although the satire is a general attack on fools, it appears that Brant treats some fools harder than others. These fools are the schluraffen, the lazy-apes inhabiting the land of indolence and luxury, the German rendition of Cockayne. However, although denizens of this fabled country, this is not their final destination. Rather, they're heading for Narragonia, a land invented by Brant himself, and in chapter 108 Sebastian Brant states that "this ship a wreck will be", prophesying a particularly bad end to the fools who also are lazy-apes, "the lazy, carefree carousers of the Land of Cockayne" (22).

You fellows, come and be on hand,

We're headed for Schluraffen land

And yet we're stuck in mud and sand

- The Ship of Fools (chapter 108), Sebastian Brant (transl. by Edwin Zeydel)
Courtesy of this website

The Antichrist versus Saint Peter, chapter 103, courtesy of this website

Concluding remarks

What, then, is the connection between the Maastricht monkeys and the ship of fools topos? If there is any such connection, I believe it must be sought in the literary works which combine the various satirical currents of medieval literature, such the beast-fable exemplified by Jacquemars Giélée, the idea of an inverted paradise exemplified by The Land of Cockayne and the idea of a ship manned with the inversive elements of medieval society exemplified by Jacob van Oestvoren. This is not to say that there is a direct connection between the illumination and Brant's satire. Nor is it to say that the Maastricht monkeys can be placed in squarely in these traditions. Rather, we see here how certain currents and ideas permeated the medieval conscience and resulted in various expressions and various media. What all these currents and depictions have in common is a focus on subversive elements who go contrary to the ideals of the satirists, often seeking to rectify these elements, but sometimes merely using them for a humorous story. What connects the Maastricht monkeys and the Ship of Fools is that they both have this focus and that they are informed by satirical currents prevalent in medieval literature. These currents drew on a common stock of iconography, which is why we sometimes find several elements recur in widely different works of literature and art, exemplified by the illumination from the Austrian Ulrich von Pottenstein's Spiegel der Weisheit (c.1430), seen below. By examining the traditions which informed the makers of these works we find ourselves in a wonderful world of mirror-images and mockery through which we may acquire a more complex understanding of the ideals of medieval society.

Into the fool's ship toss the ape

- The Ship of Fools, Sebastian Brant (transl. by Edwin Zeydel)
MS. Egerton 1121, c.1430, Austria, Spiegel der Weisheit, Ulrich von Pottenstein
Courtesy of British Library, with thanks to Damien Kempf

Blind fools can only see this earth

- The Ship of Fools, Sebastian Brant (transl. by Edwin Zeydel)
16th-century print, with thanks to Erik Kwakkel

Notes

1: Zeydel 1962: 9

2: Corèdon and Williams 2007: 35

3: Gaposchkin 2010: 106-07

4: Schirmer 1979: 95

5: Zeydel 1962: 10

6: Zeydel 1962: 10

7: Zeydel 1962: 12

8: Zeydel 1962: 11

9: Heuser 1904: 141

10: Houdoy and Roussel 1874: 14-15

11: Zeydel 1962: 12

12: Pleij 1983: 182

13: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/verw011vrou01_01/verw011vrou01_01_0012.php

14: Parsons and Jongenelen 2012: 37-38

15: Zeydel 1962: 9

16: Zeydel 1962: 13

17: Zeydel 1962: 9

18: Zeydel 1962: 13

19: Zeydel 1962: 3

20: Zeydel 1962: 15

21: Zeydel 1962: 9

22: Zeydel 1962: 15

German woodcut, 1549, from wikimedia commons

References

Books

Brant, Sebastian, The Ship of Fools, translated by Edwin Zeydel, Dover Publications, 1962

Corèdon, Christopher and Williams, Ann, A Dictionary of Medieval Terms and Phrases, D. S. Brewer, 2007

Gaposchkin, Cecilia, The Making of Saint Louis, Cornell University Press, 2010

Heuser, Wilhelm, Die Kildare-gedichte; die ältesten mittelenglischen denkmäler in anglo-irischer überlieferung von Dr. W. Heuser, 1904

Houdoy, Jules and Roussel, Henri (eds.), Renart-le-Nouvel: roman satirique composé au XIIIe siècle, 1874

Parsons, Ben and Jongenelen, Bas (eds.), Comic Drama in the Low Countries, C.1450-1560: A Critical Anthology, 2012

Pleij, Hermann, Het gilde van de Blauwe Schuit: literatuur, volksfeest en burgermoraal in de late middeleeuwen; met een nabeschouwing van de auteur, Amsterdam University Press, 1983

Schirmer, Walter Franz, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, Greenwood Press, 1979

Websites

http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/10/25/navigating-durer%E2%80%99s-woodcuts-for-the-ship-of-fools/

http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/verw011vrou01_01/verw011vrou01_01_0012.php

DISCLAIMER: I have taken most of the woodcut images from The Public Domain Review, where it is stated that these woodcuts were made by Albrecht Dürer. This is a matter of contention and due to lack of evidence I myself do not subscribe to this theory.