A Rudder for The Ship of Fools?: Bosch’s Franciscans as Jongleurs of God

Hieronymus Bosch’s painting known as The Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500) has long provoked questions regarding the meaning behind its absurd tableau of singers. For more than a century, critics have taken Bosch’s representation of Franciscans as a sign of his anticlericalism. This article reevaluates Bosch’s possible motivations, taking into consideration the literary and visual cult of folly, the agency of women song collectors, Franciscan songs and preaching method, and the practice of contrafaction in devotional lyric. Appraising the evidence using an interdisciplinary method reveals a program of symbolic inversion at work in Bosch’s painting that implicates the renowned Franciscan preachers Olivier Maillard and Jan Brugman, their religious contrafacta, and those who sang them. Depicting music as folly, I argue that Bosch may have wished to represent inversely the virtues of Franciscan preaching. What better way to portray a penitential song sung to the tune of a well-known love song than by depicting a friar and a nun singing a lute song while surrounded by symbols of lust? Consequently, one might consider these as jongleurs of God, doing something recognizable and following a tradition that goes back to the founders of the order: preaching penance by converting the folly of secular love songs into tools of piety.