Fools and Folly During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. By Barbara Swain. Published by the  Columbia University Press. New York. 1932. Pp.  234. Price $3.00.

In this book there is paraded all manner of fools, from the fools by deprivation, who know little or naught, to those who are very wise and only simulate foolishness in order that their shafts of wisdom may go

home. The fool has been an outstanding character for hundreds of years, signifying and symbolizing all sorts of things, but particularly that freedom from restraint which is so dear to the hearts of all of us at some level of our psychic structures. Then again, in harmony with this concept, the fool may be the symbol of virility, and so the breaker of the moral code as well as of social usages. His types are legion: clown, entertainer, wise man, critic, mental defective, jester, sinner, weakling, depraved, simpleton, satirist, nobleman, cynic, sage, skeptic, saint, worldling, and a thousand others.

The book is a delightful piece of literary research, filled with information of this special phenomenon during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It has no particular psychoanalytic significance. The whole matter might with great advantage be dealt with by the psychoanalyst.

White.