Thomas More's Gentle Tour Guide Raphael Hythloday of Utopia and Erasmus's scathing use of the teacher of rhetoric Folly in the Praise of Folly

Thomas More's Raphael Hythloday in More's Utopia functions as an ideal character for the reader to aspire to. Raphael is a tour guide of a better, albeit fictional place the author has envisioned. In contrast, Erasmus uses Folly as a satirical and one-dimensional teacher of irony and rhetoric to teach the reader about the real, rather than the ideal world. The reader's encounter with Folly is used to show the reader catalogues of individuals, against whose follies the reader may measure his or her own. Thus although both Thomas More and Erasmus make use of fictional characters to illustrate their philosophical works, Thomas More uses Raphael Hythloday to speak to the reader as a kind of unknowing tour guide, a man unwise to the evils of...
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