La sage folie. La delectable folie. La furieuse folie des freres en des-union (Wise folly. Delightful folly. The furious folly of brothers in quarrel), by Antonio Maria Spelta, translated by Jean Marcel. Printed in Lyon by Pierre Drobet, 1628.

Lower Library, E.44.5

Antonio Maria Spelta’s twin books, published in Italian in 1607 and here translated into French as La sage folie (Wise folly) and La delectable folie (Delightful folly),¹ argue humorously for the benefits and the ubiquity of folly, or madness: both words can translate French folie (like Italian pazzia). Yet madness in these books is ‘easily mastered’ (Michel Foucault), easy to look on fondly, being confined to harmless, not to say fanciful forms.

A distinctive, weaker sense for ‘folly’ was already available in contemporary English (the book of Ecclesiastes in the King James Bible is a useful study); but Spelta, with his translator, has to produce a distinction under the single word, which he manages in La delectable folie by abusing as ‘cucumbers’ and ‘pumpkins’ the scholars who would find ‘a logician’s equipollence,² a philosopher’s relation, or a theologian’s identity’ between, say, the torments and unpredictable violence of the biblical Saul, and the beneficent madness that Plato makes Socrates praise as a ‘divine gift’ (Phaedrus, translated by Christopher Rowe, 1986).

Unlike Plato, though, for whom the gift remains exceptional, Spelta in La sage folie portrays an ordinary, and necessary, madness. For one thing, it sustains the human species: mothers who calmly reviewed the pains of childbirth would never have second children, and anyway, men would view sex with terror if they cared to ‘[open] their eyes’³ to its risks. Folly, however – personified in the ancient Greek and Roman goddess, revived here as an allegory – leads both to ‘the game of love’. The infants born of these foolish couplings come into the world helpless, but they are under Folly’s ‘protection and defence’: their foolish simplicity makes even unrelated adults cherish them. And it is Folly that preserves friendships, marriages, and political settlements, when she makes us foolishly overlook the faults of the other.

This humour could be familiar. The conceits above, and nearly all those in La sage folie, are also in Desiderius Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: published in Latin in 1511, banned in the Counter-Reformation, and never mentioned here. Erasmus’s Folly, who counts all writers among her followers, especially esteems plagiarists; but Spelta is more. Whereas Erasmus’s text is a literary speech, not just in praise but in the brilliant person of Folly, Spelta writes as an observer, in a looser treatise form. A sentence in Erasmus returns as a chapter in Spelta, illustrated with historical and literary examples. Even so, Spelta’s satirical turn in his second book spares the elites that Erasmus attacks – notably the theologians, monks, and clergy (from popes downwards) of his own Catholic Church – in favour of a motley list of tutors, scribes, litigants, actors, hunters, and others.

Spelta’s work found considerable success in its time, such that this translation by Jean Marcel competed with another French translation by Louis Garon, remarkably also published in 1628. The work had already been translated into German and Latin. (The last French edition, which used Marcel’s translation, seems to date to 1650.) Although disregarded by scholarship, these books too participated in what Foucault identifies in his History of Madness (translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, 2006) as ‘the long process that began with Erasmus’,⁴ in which madness, doubled as a ‘mad madness’ and a ‘wise madness’ (in the French, ‘sage folie’), was made ‘interior to reason’.

1. What is advertised on the title page as a third book, La furieuse folie des freres en des-union, proves to be an ordinary chapter in the second.
2. The text only borrows the technical term to make fun, but equipollence would be the relation of equivalence between one proposition and certain negations of its opposites.
3. By a slip, the text says the contrary: if they cared to ‘blindfold their eyes’.
4. Translation from Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1972) modified.