Ship of Fools

Brant, Sebastian.The ship of fools, translated by Alexander Barclay. Edited by T.H. Jamieson. Translated by Alexander Barclay. Edinburgh William Paterson, 1874. 

As Zeydel explains in his annotation to this passage, "The word is guck-uss. There may be a pun involved. The cuckoo might refer to the foolishness of the alchemist, to the fact that he, like the cuckoo, lays his eggs in others nests to be hatched, and the word gucken, to look or to peep, may also be in Brant s mind." Zeydel, The Ship of Fools, 388 n. 6. 

The Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brant, Edited and translated by Edwin H. 

FIGURE 65. Our quite deceptive alchemist from The Ship of Fools. This figure is from the 1506 Basel edition, from The Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical... 

S. Brant, The Ship of Fools, translated into rhyming couplets with introduction and commentary by Edwin H. Zeydel, Dover Publications, New York, 1962 (reprint of 1944 edition). 

This day is also called Dorsetshire and Fools clay, Poole being the port of shipment It is obtained chiefly from the neighborhood of Wareham, and large quantities are shipped annually fox Staffordshire and other parts of the United Kingdom. 

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