A Basel lawyer loaded a ship with fools and sailed it across Europe
In 1494 Sebastian Brant, a Strasbourg innkeeper's son trained in canon and civil law, published Das Narrenschiff, an allegory of a vessel crewed and steered by fools bound for a paradise called Narragonia. It mocked the vices of his age so effectively that Latin and English imitations spread its satire well beyond Germany.
Brant was born in Strasbourg in 1457 or 1458 to Diebold and Barbara Brant, who kept an inn. He enrolled at the University of Basel in October 1475, moved from philosophy into law, began teaching there in 1483 and earned a law doctorate in 1489. His early reputation rested on Neo-Latin verse, but he saw that Latin reached only a narrow circle and began rendering his own poems, and those of others, into German.
Basel's printing houses became his real workshop. Between 1488 and 1501 he is known to have had a hand in ninety-five books, many issued by his friend Johann Bergmann von Olpe, and he helped Johann Amerbach edit the Church fathers Augustine and Ambrose. The Narrenschiff itself came off Michael Furter's press. Episodic rather than plotted, it invented Saint Grobian as a patron for the coarse and vulgar. A Latin rendering by Jakob Locher in 1497 rivalled the original, and Alexander Barclay made a loose English version in 1509.
In 1500 he went home to Strasbourg as syndic, and in 1503 became the city's chancellor, a post whose workload largely ended his literary output. Emperor Maximilian I named him an Imperial Councillor in 1502, and he later sat as a judge at the imperial court in Speyer. A Catholic with conservative religious views, he still let Protestants preach in the market square and print books while he held office. He also urged the emperor to push back the Ottomans, arguing that moral renewal was needed to keep the Empire safe.
Brant married Elisabeth Bürg, a cutler's daughter, in 1485 and fathered seven children, with Amerbach and Johann Froben among the godfathers. He taught his eldest son Onophrius Latin from the cradle and put him into university at seven. He occasionally signed himself Titio, a rare Latin word for firebrand, and died on 10 May 1521.
Source: Sebastian Brant
