Beatrice Otto

‘Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh…’ (Umberto Eco, Name of the Rose)

Beatrice is the author of the award-winning Fools Are Everywhere: The court jester around the world (Chicago UP, 2001), which won the American Association of Publishers’ award for outstanding book of the year in Scholarly Publishing: Language & Literature. 

Having studied classical and modern Chinese in three universities, the fool as a globe-spanning archetype blazed into her consciousness the day she discovered the vivid biographies of Chinese court jesters by China’s Herodotus, Sima Qian (145-c. 86 BC). Flourishing over 1,500 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 every lead, including over 400 stories of Chinese jesters ranging across two millennia worth of primary sources.

For a list of reviews, publications and citations: https://www.beatriceotto.com/author/

‘Stultorum plena sunt omnia’, said the ancients, or ‘fools are everywhere’, and so it has proved.  To highlight this universal fact, Beatrice is building the most sparkling, scholarly and sweeping online treasury to promote the appreciation of fools and jesters throughout history and across the world.

Modest ambitions, as you know, never got anybody anywhere.

Foolsareeverywhere.com draws on thousands of stories, images and quotations in a dozen or so languages, amassed when researching the book of the same name.  It features:

*  a growing mosaic of primary source quotations and stories
*  an annotated bibliography of erudite yet engaging studies selected from the hundreds of references used in the Fools Are Everywhere research
*  a judiciously selected and indispensable canon of ground-breaking works
*  a visual gallery of fools real, imaginary, or both
*  a biographical alphabet of named fools

Please sign up at: https://www.foolsareeverywhere.com

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“If we want everything to continue, everything first has to change.”  (Tancredi to Prince Salinas, The Leopard, Lampedusa)

Having long been interested in human happiness and a healthy environment, these felt like separate if related issues until ‘sustainability’ provided a meeting point.  For twenty years Beatrice has worked with designers, business people and government to try to expand that point into a growing space for positive action, including nearly a decade as Director Member Relations at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.  

https://www.beatriceotto.com/sustainability/

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“I look upon fine phrases as a lover.”  (John Keats)

And now for another passion: bright writing, which Beatrice celebrates through WritingRedux.com, an expanding pool of limpid English with thousands of sparkling quotations and metaphors gathered during decades of attentive reading.

https://www.writingredux.com

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"They have a quality of nuannaarpoq, of taking extravagant pleasure in being alive; and they delight in finding it in other people."  (Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams)

Nuannaarpoq.com celebrates a magical quality in humanity and the people it illuminates, accentuating the humanising forces of kindness, humour and delight, and the authentic, unlimited enjoyment of life on what the poet Gumilyov called ‘our brave, our cheerful, our wicked planet’.

Nuannaarpoq.com was inspired by an Inuit word of universal implications which it will refract through a personal prism, holding it up to the light to show its variegated colours.

https://www.nuannaarpoq.com