The Praise of Folly is the best known work of the greatest of the renaissance humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam. It is a fantasy which starts off as a learned frivolity but turns into a full-scale ironic encomium after the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian, the first and in its way the finest example of a new form of renaissance satire. It ends with a straightforward and touching statement of the Christian ideals which Erasmus shared notably with his English friends, John Colet and Thomas More.