It was written in 1509 to amuse Thomas More, on whose name its Greek title Moriae Encomium is a pun, as a private allusion to their cooperation in translating Lucian some years earlier. It was a retreat into the intimacy of their friendship at a moment when Erasmus, just back from Italy, was ill, disillusioned at the state of the Church under Julius II, and perhaps uncertain whether he had been right to turn down the curial post of apostolic penitentiary and promise of further preferment offered him if he stayed in Rome. He tells us that he wrote the Praise of Folly in a week, while staying with More and waiting for his books to turn up. It was certainly revised before publication in 1511, and the internal evidence leads one to suppose that it was considerably augmented and re-written. About an eighth of the text here translated was added after the first edition, but before 1522. The text as we have it now moves from lighthearted banter to a serious indictment of theologians and churchmen, before finally expounding the virtues of the Christian way of life, which St. Paul says looks folly to the worId and calls the folly of the Cross (I Corinthians i, 18 ff.).