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 &lt;h3&gt;Contents&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;pre&gt; Acknowledgments.............................................................ix Introduction................................................................1 1 Tomfoolery in Earnest.....................................................21 2 The Jihad of St. Alban....................................................31 3 Burton's Antics...........................................................49 4 Remedial Education in Professor Bayle's History Class.....................63 5 Franklin's Double Take on Rights..........................................89 6 The Smile of a Philosophic Historian......................................109 Index of Names..............................................................133  &lt;/pre&gt;

The role of the fool is to provoke the powerful to question their convictions, preferably while avoiding a beating. Fools accomplish this not by hectoring their audience, but by broaching sensitive topics indirectly, often disguising their message in a joke or a tale. Writers and thinkers throughout history have adopted the fool's approach, and here Ralph Lerner turns to six of them--Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Gibbon--to elucidate the strategies these men employed to persuade the heedless, the zealous, and the overly confident to pause

Playing the fool : subversive laughter in troubled times