Participant Info
- First Name
- Beatrice
- Last Name
- Otto
- Country
- Switzerland
- State
- beatrice@beatriceotto.com
- Affiliation
- Independent scholar & award-winning author
- Website URL
- www.foolsareeverywhere.com
- Keywords
- fools, jesters, court fool, court jester, humour, humor, fools and jesters
- Availability
- 1
- Additional Contact Information
- Available for interviews and to give lively, illustrated talks.
- PhD
- other credentials
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Beatrice is author of Fools Are Everywhere: The court jester around the world (Chicago University Press, 2001 & 2007), winner of the American Association of Publishers award for outstanding book of the year in Scholarly Publishing: Language & Literature.
The fool as a globe-spanning archetype blazed into her consciousness the day she discovered vivid biographies of court jesters by China’s Herodotus, Sima Qian. Flourishing over 1500 years before Shakespeare encoded Lear’s fool in our cultural DNA, they were strikingly similar to the Western court jester. This prompted five years’ research pursuing leads in half a dozen languages, including over 400 stories of Chinese jesters ranging across two millennia worth of primary sources.
Drawing on this and on new research, Beatrice is now building the most sparkling, scholarly and sweeping online resource to promote the appreciation of fools and jesters throughout history and across the world: www.foolsareeverywhere.com. This is feeding thousands of primary source quotations, stories and images through the pipeline, and reviewing hundreds of papers, theses, articles and books on fools and jesters.
Modest ambitions, as you know, never got anybody anywhere.
In her spare time, she founded the literary website WritingRedux to celebrate bright writing, and the life-loving website Nuannaarpoq.
Look forward to meeting you.
- Recent Publications
-
Overview: Erasmus – Moriae Encomium – Praise of Folly
Overview: Ma Ling – Huixie zhuan – Biographies of Humorists
Overview: Sima Qian – Guji liezhuan – Accounts of Jesters
Overview: Karl Friedrich Flögel – Geschichte der Hofnarren (1789)
Overview: Ren Erbei – Youyu Ji – Collected Sayings of Jesters
Overview: Jessica Secmezsoy-Urquhart – Off Evere Full…
Overview: Maddalena Rumor – No Fool Like an Old Fool
‘The court jester is universal, but is he still relevant?’, Management and Organization Review, September 2015, 11:3, pp. 559-73.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- ottobeatrice
- Country Focus
- Expertise by Geography
- China, England, France
- Expertise by Chronology
- Pre-17th century, 17th century
- Expertise by Topic
