 The wise fool received tremendous popularity in the literary imagination during the Italian and English Renaissances.In Italian scholar Erasmus' "Moriae encomium," written in 1509 and first published in 1511, the author portrays Stultitia, the goddess of folly, and a wise fool herself, who asks what it means to be a fool and puts forth a brazen argument praising folly and claiming that all people are fools of one kind or another.According to scholar Walter Kaiser, Stultitia is "the foolish creation of the most learned man of his time, she is the literal embodiment of the word "oxymoron," and in her idiotic wisdom she represents the finest flowering of that fusion of Italian humanistic thought and northern piety which has been called Christian Humanism."