The Fool Errant

The Fool Errant is a 1905 picaresque novel by Maurice Hewlett (1861-1923), the English historical novelist famous for The Forest Lovers and The Queen’s Quair. The book presents the memoirs of Francis Strelley, a young English gentleman in eighteenth-century Italy whose innocent high-mindedness repeatedly lands him in absurd and dangerous adventures as he wanders the peninsula among nobles, rogues, players, and revolutionaries, devoted throughout to a married woman he serves with quixotic loyalty. Hewlett uses the fool-errant figure to play chivalric idealism against worldly Italy, in the rich period manner he had perfected in his medieval romances. The novel belongs to the Edwardian vogue for eighteenth-century picaresque and shows Hewlett’s lighter comic register. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.