1. On the circumstances of the composition of the Praise of Folly, see the Introduction. The references to idleness and writing on horseback, like the date-line 'from the country' should not be taken literally. They are conventional scholarly disclaimers, like that of Petrarch who claimed to have written his own discourse on his ignorance on a boat, or that of More who claimed to have composed his Utopia at odd moments. These are conventional warnings that we should not regard the ensuing work as totally serious. Erasmus's reference here to 'idle gossip' is the first of many Greek words in the original Latin text (indicated by single quotation marks in the translation). These Greek words, many of which Erasmus, himself coined, emphasize that the introductory epistle, like the work it prefaces, was a formal literary exercise, however serious or however light-hearted.

2. The word Erasmus uses for praise, 'encomium', is simply the Latinized form of the Greek word for a laudatory composition in prose or verse, originally denoting a song for athletic victors. As a literary form the encornium soon became a sophisticated genre used to praise legendary heroes or for purposes of satire or fantasy. Lijster ponderously distinguishes it from the Hymn in his commentary, pointing out that hymns are only used for praising gods. Moriae in the Latin title Encomium Moriae is simply a Latin transcription of the genitive of the Greek word for folly. The pun on More's name was of course deliberate.

3. The reference to the goddess Athene is a quotation from the Odyssey (21, I). Democritus, the Greek philosopher of the fifth century B.C., is said by Juvenal (10. 28-30) and Seneca (de Ira, 2, 10, 5) constantly to have been amused by the spectacle of humanity.

4. Erasmus uses a diminutive for his 'little declamation', but the word still denotes a formal rhetorical exercise. The word for 'memento' is in Greek in the Latin text, as it is in the text of Catullus (12, 13) to which Erasmus alludes. More did take the Praise of Folly to himself, and defended it in a letter to Martin Dorp written in October 1515, just as Erasmus took to himself More's Utopia by procuring its publication at Louvain in 1516. Erasmus was right about his detractors but, as he well knew, it was not merely his frivolous tone they would attack.

5. This erudite list of precedents is not merely pedantic, although its humour is learned. It was a fairly well-known catalogue, repeated with various additions and subtractions by a number of renaissance satirists, but in Erasmus it also constitutes a semi-serious bid to protect himself against the inevitable charge of irreverence, and it fits in well with the technique of exploiting great learning in the interests of amusement, a technique in which Erasmus was to he followed and superseded by Rabelais.
    'Old' Comedy, represented typically by Aristophanes, centred on personal invective, or on the fantastic and the burlesque. Lucian of Samosata was the author of a series of satirical dialogues, some of which were translated by Erasmus and More, which were extremely influential in the renaissance. From such works as Lucian's Encomium of the Fly and On the Parasite derives the renaissance mock encomium as a literary genre.
   The Battle of Frogs and Mice is in fact a parody of Homer from the fourth century B.C. The Gnat and the Garlic Salad are both from the apocryphal Appendix Virgiliana. The gnat awakened a peasant in danger from a snake, was crushed by him and appeared to him in a dream to demand proper funeral rites. The Garlic Salad describes the first part of a day in the life of a peasant.
   The Nut, ascribed by Erasmus to Ovid, is a probably apocryphal complaint by a nut-tree, wounded by the stones thrown at it to knock off the nuts.
   Polycrates, a rhetorician of the fourth century B.C., composed several encomia, some of them strongly criticized by Isocrates who wrote a rejoinder to his Busiris, the name of a legendary Egyptian king who slaughtered all foreigners entering Egypt until he was himself slain by Hercules.
   Glaucon is a character in Plato's Republic, where he is said to have written a dialogue on injustice. Favorinus was a favourite of Hadrian whose works have not survived. Thersites, a character in the Iliad said to have been the subject of Favorinus's encomium, was ugly, deformed, low-born and foul-tongued. Synesius was a bishop of the early fifth century A.D. who wrote a mock encomium on baldness. Seneca's Apocolocyntosis is a skit in prose and verse on the deification of the emperor Claudius, under whom Seneca had been banished.
   Plutarch, whose influence on the renaissance was probably greater than that of any other single author, wrote a dialogue in which Gryllus, turned into a pig by Circe, tries to persuade Ulysses that an animal's lot is happier than a man's. Apuleius is the author of The Golden Ass, the only surviving whole Latin novel. Grunnius Corocotta is a hybrid animal whose testament, composed in the third century A.D., was used for the amusement of schoolboys. It is mentioned by St. Jerome, whose works Erasmus was to edit in 1516.

6. Lijster gives references from Martial and Ovid to the game of 'thieves' played with pieces on a board like chess or draughts. The reference to riding a stick comes from Horace (Satires, 2, 3, 248).

7. The term 'scent' is an implied reference to Horace (Epodes, 12,3). The Latin term for 'botched up' comes from Aulus Gellius (13, 25, 19 and 2, 23, 21). Lijster comments that lots of speeches have been composed to urge the princes to war against the Turks for the financial advantage to be gained, when it would have been more appropriate to urge Christians to war against vice. The point about goat's wool in the next sentence is a reminiscence of Horace (Epistles, I, 18, 15). Erasmus, like Pico della Mirandola from whom he derives much, disapproved of the superstitious and determinist overtones of astrology and not infrequently attacked its professional practitioners.

8. Erasmus takes the word for 'self-love', philautia, from Plutarch and Horace, both of whom emphasize the blindness it causes. Rabelais, who also entertains by treating trivialities with a strengthening undercurrent of seriousness as his novel proceeds, was to take over the term philautie which, in the Third Book becomes the reason for Panurge's blindness and his inability either to answer his question or to resolve his uncertainties by action.

9. Lijster maintains that the honorific titles referred to are the customary forms of address such as 'most victorious and serene' for kings, 'most reverend' for cardinals and 'venerable' for abbesses.

10. Erasmus is here offering a somewhat elaborately disingenuous excuse for his satire on the grounds that, since it is put into the mouth of Folly herself, consistency demanded an attack on what was wise. Those who feel themselves attacked in the Praise of Folly should therefore take it as a compliment to their wisdom. Juvenal, to whom he refers, was the Latin satirist known for his ruthless diatribes on the corruption of Roman society.

11. The date of the letter-preface has been the subject of much controversy. The notation 'from the country' does not need to be taken as establishing more than the genre and is not necessarily a statement of fact. The date 1508 given by the 1522 Basle edition of Froben is impossible, and no earlier edition gives any year. The Praise of Folly was written at More's house in Chelsea during July and August 1509. At the beginning of July that year, Erasmus was still in Rome, so that the month-date excludes any year before 1510. The most probable view is that Erasmus wrote the letter-preface with the Praise of Folly itself in the summer of 1509, but that he added 9 June (without a year) when he corrected the text for publication in 1511, in which case the words 'from the country' might or might not refer to somewhere near Paris, where Erasmus went from More's residence at Bucklersbury to see the Praise of Folly through the press. It is likely that the first, and very faulty, edition appeared in the early part of July. The erroneous year-date of 1508 added by Froben in 1522 may possibly derive from an apparent reference in More's letter to Dorp of 1515 to the fact that the Praise of Folly had appeared seven years previously. But the number seven may be a manuscript misreading.