Post -Nate Strum

In Praise of Folly and The Abbot and the Learned Lady were funny and easy to read. They feel very much like modern social commentaries. However, Antronious from Learned Lady is such a buffoon that I would be surprised if he isn't a strawman. On the other hand, perhaps some abbots really were like this, and the only reason that he seem so obviously to be a buffoon has to do with the fact that our modern paradigm was shaped by criticisms like these in the first place, i.e., this is possibly a case of the original work seeming cliché due its having been so fully absorbed into our minds even though it was highly original at the time of its publication.

I made one really long comment on Phillip's post.