S IS FOR STANDUP COMEDY

     Who needs comedy clubs when you can have your own personal jester(s) on call 24/7?  If the jester is a member of your household, you don't ever have to worry about the show being sold out before you've had a chance to score tickets. 

 
     The jester could have many talents - singing, dancing, juggling, acrobatics, magic tricks - but primarily, his job  was to make people laugh, with his jokes or with his physical comedy or both.  Not only royals, but also wealthy aristocrats, kept jesters as household members.  Recruitment was apparently a pretty casual process, as shown in this 1662 account of the recruitment of a man named Tarlton to be a jester for Queen Elizabeth I:

          Here he was in the field, keeping his father's swine, when a servant of
          Robert Earl of Leicester... was so highly pleased with his happy/
          unhappy answers, that he brought him to Court, where he became
          the most famous jester to Queen Elizabeth.

     To quote from Beatrice K. Otto's FOOLS ARE EVERYWHERE: THE COURT JESTER AROUND THE WORLD (University of Chicago Press, 2001), an online excerpt of which has provided me with much of the information I share in this post:

                        An individual court jester in Europe could emerge from a
                        wide range of backgrounds; an erudite but nonconformist
                        university dropout, a monk thrown out of a priory for
                        nun frolics, a jongleur [juggler] with exceptional verbal
                        or physical dexterity, or the apprentice of a village
                        blacksmith whose fooling amused a passing nobleman.
                        Just as a modern-day television stand-up comedian might
                        begin his career on the pub and club circuit, so a would-be
                         jester could make it big time in court if he was lucky
                         enough to be spotted.

     Some jesters were witty and well-educated.  Some were just naturally funny people, the smartasses of their era.  Unfortunately, others were chosen from among the ranks of the physically or mentally handicapped.  Dwarves abounded in the profession..  

      There were also a fair share of "naturals," people with intellectual limitations who were, on the one hand, mocked and infantilized, but on the other hand, were treated with a measure of awe because they were thought to be divinely inspired.
     Otto contends that "the court jester is a universal phenomenon," and cites to historical records from China, India, Japan, Russia and Africa.   But fortunately for 16th-century European jesters, the long tradition of their profession was given a boost by the 1511 publication of a short book by the philosopher Desiderius Erasmus called IN PRAISE OF FOLLY:

                         We have all seen how an appropriate and well-timed joke
                          can sometimes influence even grim tyrants... The most
                          violent tyrants put up with their clowns and fools, though
                          these often made them the butt of open insults.

     According to Otto, "the fortunes of the European court jesters rose and fell with the tsunami-scale wave of medieval and Renaissance fool mania that engulfed the continent."  Thanks to Erasmus, folly became a hot topic in Europe, and professional "fools" became hugely popular for their illustration of the concept as well as for their entertainment value.

traditional jester's hat sporting three points, each ending in a jingle bell

older-style jester's costume, featuring hat with ass's ears
 

     But there was a second aspect of jesterdom that Otto says was also universal: "jesters everywhere were allowed and encouraged to offer counsel and to influence the whims and policies of kings."  Instead of being expected to fawn over and flatter their masters like everyone else, jesters were given unique liberty to speak their minds and to offer criticisms that might have gotten anyone else thrown into a dungeon, as the above quote from Erasmus demonstrates.  This situation led to the paradox of the "wise fool," a societal outcast who sees and says things more clearly and truthfully than anyone else.  A prime example is the Fool in Shakespeare's King Lear, who repeatedly (and with impunity) chastised the old king for his poor judgment and egotistical shortsightedness.  On the other hand, once Lear was dethroned by his conniving daughters and had become a demented, friendless, homeless old man, the Fool was the only person who loyally stayed by his side in his wanderings.

     In short, a jester's master might have had the jester at his beck and call, but in exchange, he would have to put up with whatever verbal abuse the jester felt like dishing out.  So it really was like stand-up comedy in a way; the Fool would get heckled, but he would heckle the audience right back.
 

K IS FOR KINDLE

    
 
     It's not plagiarism if you steal from yourself, am I right?   I've previously written about someone who did for 16th-century readers much of what the Kindle has done for 21st-century readers: made books more portable and thus, more accessible.   So without further ado, I'm going to quote part of a post I did for last year's A to Z Challenge about Aldus Manutius (1449-1515), an Italian humanist who, among other things, is considered the father of standardized punctuation.  Although there are still some people who chafe at punctuation rules, no one can dispute that at least one of his printing innovations profoundly changed the way people read books.

   Manutius was a publisher and printer who invented italic type, developed some elements of modern punctuation, and perhaps most importantly, introduced the idea of printing inexpensive volumes of books bound in vellum in "octavo" size - much smaller and more portable than the then-standard size [my 2016 note: up to that point, books were usually printed either in folio size - four pages to a sheet of paper - or quarto size - eight pages to a sheet.  Octavo size was appreciably smaller - sixteen pages to a sheet] - that were distributed and read much as paperback books are in modern times.  Manutius, and the Aldine Press which he founded, had no less of an admirer than Erasmus, who worked at Manutius's press for a while during his stint in Italy, and had this to say:

             However one may sing the praises of those who by their virtue either defend
             or increase the glory of their country, their actions only affect worldly pros-
             perity, and within narrow limits. But the man who sets fallen learning on its
             feet (and this is almost more difficult than to originate it in the first place) is
             building up a sacred and immortal thing, and serving not one province alone
             but all peoples and all generations. Once this was the task of princes, and it
             was the greatest glory of Ptolemy. But his library was contained between the
             narrow walls of its own house, and Aldus is building up a library which has
             no other limits than the world itself.

     Manutius founded the Aldine Press, and came up with the logo of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, inspired by an image on ancient Roman coins.  The logo was such a success that it was immediately pirated by French and Italian publishers, and is still used by Doubleday, a Random House division.

E IS FOR DESIDERIUS ERASMUS

                                                              (1466 - 1536)

     Born in Rotterdam, Erasmus was raised, and was provided an excellent education which included  the study of Greek, by his parents (unmarried - his father was a Catholic priest), who both died of the plague in 1483.  His guardians then insisted on his entering a Dutch monastery, where he spent the next six years and was ordained a priest at about the age of 25.  Erasmus had already achieved a reputation as a brilliant scholar, and this was his ticket out of the canonical life: he was offered a post as secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, France, whom he served for several years.  In 1495, with the Bishop's approval, he moved to Paris, where he studied at the University and became  acquainted with the scholarly new wave of Renaissance humanism, and supported himself by teaching until 1498.  He moved to England for a short time after that, but was back in France by 1500 and remained there for the next six years.  From 1506 to 1509 he was at Turin University in Italy.  Another stint at Queens College in Cambridge, England as a professor of Divinity followed, and then a residency at Leuven, the Netherlands.  After 1514 he lived alternately between England and Basel, Switzerland.  He didn't seem to ever be able to select any one place as a  home base.  Throughout his life, he was offered many permanent and prestigious academic posts, and he turned all of them down.  Rightly or wrongly, he believed that getting himself enmeshed with any one institution would hamper his intellectual freedom.  Instead, he chose to wander from place to place, chronically short of money and always asking his friends for loans.  Am I the only one reminded here of another great philosopher, Janis Joplin?  "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose..."  (Yes, I know Joplin didn't write "Me and Bobby McGee," but she embodied it.)
     In 1512 Erasmus embarked on a massive project, which he completed and published in 1516: a translation of the entire New Testament into both Latin and Greek (which also constituted the first published Greek translation).  He produced a second edition in 1519, a third in 1522, a fourth in 1527, and a fifth and final one in 1535, the year before his death.  While these were his most widely distributed works, Erasmus wrote numerous other books, many of them bitingly sarcastic criticisms of all classes of society, but in particular of abuses he perceived within the Church.
     Meanwhile, in 1517, Martin Luther had published his Ninety-FiveTheses, thus officially kicking off the Protestant Reformation.  Luther and his followers were delighted with Erasmus's harsh words about the Church and tried to persuade him to join their cause, but (no surprise, perhaps, knowing what we know about his stubborn independence) he refused to break with the Church and attempted to walk an impossible line by supporting both the Church and the Reformation; as he said, "I detest dissention because it goes both against the teachings of Christ and against a secret inclination of nature.  I doubt that either side in the dispute can be suppressed without grave loss."  Needless to say, this studied neutrality did not go over well with either party, both of which adopted the view that if Erasmus wasn't with them, he must be against them.  Finally, in 1524, Erasmus directly attacked Luther (or at least, Luther's views about the nonexistence of free will) in his writings, and Luther enthusiastically returned the favor.  The split between them was never healed.  Nonetheless, until the end of his life, Erasmus was deeply distrusted by the Church and suspected of being a heretic.
     Long before the phrase came into existence, Erasmus was the classic polarizing figure.  He had multitudes of intellectual friends from all over Europe, and corresponded with more than 500 of them.  But his public reputation was extremely mixed until the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century, when he rose again in the world's estimation.  Not everyone saw him in a positive light even then, however.  And the current Catholic Encyclopedia says both that Erasmus was "the most brilliant and most important leader of German humanism," and that "his vanity and egotism were boundless, and to gratify them he was ready to pursue former friends with defamation and invective.... His was an absolutely unspeculative brain, and he lacked entirely all power of acute philosophical definition."  They weren't holding back, were they?  The Church, at least, remains unwilling to forgive and forget; it still blames Erasmus for the Reformation.  On the other hand, can you guess after whom the modern-day European Union student exchange program is named?  A profoundly gifted writer, a fierce proponent of education, a theologian, a humanist philosopher...  Erasmus was all these things, and more.

 I'll end this post with a few quotes from this most quotable of Renaissance thinkers (he would have aced Twitter):

     -  It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.

     -  In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

     -  When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.

    And, finally: