Ship of Fools
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:Narrenschiff (1549).jpg The ship of fools is an old allegory, which has long been used in Western culture in literature and paintings. With a sense of self-criticism it describes the world and us humans on it as a vessel whose deranged passengers neither know nor care where they are going. Ships of Fools featured as wagons in medieval Carnival Parades. The actual practice of sending a group of "fools" or madmen off in a ship to another European town was said to have originated in medieval times, but has recently been proven to be a legend.
Ship of Fools may also refer to:
In art:
- The Ship of Fools, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch
- Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff), a 1494 satire by Sebastian Brant
- Ship of Fools, a play by Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber
- Ship of Fools, a 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter
- Ship of Fools, a 1965 motion picture, based on the novel
- Ship of Fools, a 2001 award-winning science fiction novel by Richard Paul Russo.
- Ship of Fools, an artist collective on a seaworthy vessel sailing since 1993 on a festive pageant around the world in praise of folly. www.azart.org
- A Far Side comic depicts two pictures, one of a car full of people, and the other as a ship full of people, and captions them as "Ship of Fools" and "Car of Idiots."
In music:
- Ship of Fools, a Grateful Dead song
- Ship of Fools, a Doors song
- Ship of Fools, an Erasure song
- Ship of Fools, an album by Tuxedomoon
- Ship of Fools, a Robert Plant song
- Ship of Fools, a World Party song
- Ship of Fools, a John Cale song
- Ship of Fools, a song from Tsubasa Chronicle
- Ship of Fools, a song from Soul Asylum
- Ship of Fools, an album by John Renbourn
- Ship of Fools, a song by Van Der Graaf Generator
In other contexts:
- Ship of Fools, a popular UK-based Christian website
- Ship of Fools, an apocryphal medieval European method of dealing with mental illness
- The Golgafrinchan B Ark in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Compare "God fashioned the ship of the world carefully" from The Black Riders by Stephen Crane.