Sebastian Brant, Stultifera navis = The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, tr. Alexander Barclay (London: Richard Pynson, 1509)

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This hugely successful satirical critique on society popularised the allegory of the fool across Europe

Ten years after his arrival in England around 1483, the Frenchman Richard Pynson (1449-1529/30), one of the most successful early printers in England, became ‘a naturalized English citizen’ (Neville-Sington). His main source of income were legal texts even before becoming the king’s printer in 1506 and securing the ‘exclusive right to print all statutes and proclamations’ a few years later (Neville-Sington). He also produced luxury books, like the missals for the Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry VII in 1500 and 1504, and he was often the first printer in England to adopt new developments in typography (Waite, p. 193).

The Shyp of Folys was the first of many collaborations between Pynson and Alexander Barclay (c. 1484-1552). It is a bilingual (Latin-English) edition of Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff, first published in Basel (Switzerland) in 1494. The High German verse satire uses the allegory of a ship boarded and steered by fools as a moral criticism of society. The work was an immediate and resounding success in Germany and beyond. A translation into Latin (1497) was closely followed by two French translations in 1497 (verse) and 1498 (prose). In England, Barclay and Pynson raced Henry Watson and Wynkyn de Worde, the German printer who had worked with Caxton and taken over the printing shop after Caxton’s death, to issue the first English translation of Brant’s bestseller (Carlson, pp. 291-5). Although their competitors published six months earlier, Barclay and Pynson’s product was of better quality (Carlson, pp. 294-5).

Settling some private scores, Barclay expanded Brant’s catalogue of satirical attacks by adding ‘secondary clerks of the college […] for unwillingness to learn, neighbouring parish clergy for ignorance and worldliness, and a group of named men of Ottery [where Barclay lived] for being frauds and thieves’ (Orme). Pynson included copies of the original Basel edition’s woodcuts. In the past, all, most, or some of these have variously been attributed to Albrecht Dürer, although there is no evidence for his involvement (Rockenberger).