BRANT, SEBASTIAN (BRANDT)

German humanist author and satirist; b. Strassburg, 1457; d. there, May 10, 1521. He was the son of an innkeeper and entered the University of Basel (1475), where he taught Roman and Canon Law (1489–99). When Emperor Maximilian I ceded Basel to Switzerland, Brant returned to his birthplace and through the intercession of Geiler von Kaisersburg (1445–1510), a famous scholar and powerful preacher, became Syndikus (1500) and three years later city clerk of Strassburg and was named an imperial councilor and Count Palatinate. Although born in a time of transition, Brant adhered to the old faith and to the medieval traditions of the German Empire.

Apart from judicial treatises, Brant wrote religious and politico-historical poems; he translated Vergil, some writings of the Church Fathers, the complete works of Petrarch, and Latin hymns and aphorisms by Cato, Facetus, and others. He also reedited Freidank's (d. c. 1233) didactic Bescheidenheit (1508). None of these works, however, attained the fame of his first work, Das Narrenschiff (1494), which was reprinted, reedited, revised, plagiarized, imitated, and translated many times. A Latin version by Jacob Locher, Stultifera navis (1497), was translated into English by Alexander Barclay (1509). The original had been composed in Brant's native Alsatian dialect at a time when most chanceries and individual authors used modern High German, and the language—in versification as well as in the choice of expression— betrays clumsiness, but the theme and its verse treatment apparently charmed readers of that time.

Das Narrenschiff is a satire on all the sins, crimes, and foibles of mankind, which are treated, after the humanist fashion, with ridicule as being follies. There are 112 categories of "fools" on board the ship that is to take them to Schlaraffenland (Utopia) on their way to Narragonia. But the ship is wrecked and all perish. Brant's treatment of an old theme is new in that he does not gravely judge and admonish his readers, but holds a mirror up to them (the text was accompanied by explanatory woodcuts) so that they may recognize themselves, be ashamed, and abjure the evil that springs from a lack of self-knowledge. His gentle hints are fortified by learned allusions to the Bible, Vergil, Ovid, the Fathers of the Church, and the Corpus Iuris, and to idioms and popular proverbs. Thus the satire becomes a treasure trove of practical wisdom. This first bourgeois satire received high praise: Brant's friend Geiler modeled more than 100 sermons on the different categories of fools, and another contemporary, the Swiss Franciscan Thomas murner (c. 1475–1537), an outspoken adversary of Martin Luther, followed its style in his Die Narrenbeschwörung and Die Schelmenzunft (1512).

Bibliography: s. brant, Das Narrenschiff, ed. f. schultz (Strassburg 1913), new fac. ed. with an epilogue. w. kosch, Deutsches Literature-Lexikon, 4 v. (2d ed. Bern 1947–58) 1:210, with bibliog.

[s. a. schulz]