The date of the letter preface has been the subject of much controversy. The notation 'from the country' does not need to be taken as establishing more than the genre and is not necessarily a statement of fact. The date 1508 given by the 1522 Basle edition of Froben is impossible, and no earlier edition gives any year. The Praise Of Folly was written at More's house in Chelsea during July and August 1509. At the beginning of July that year, Erasmus was still in Rome, so that the month-date excludes any year before 1510. The most probable view is that Erasmus wrote the letter-preface with the Praise of Folly itself in the late summer of 1509, but that he added 9 June (without a year) when he corrected the text for publication in 1511, when Erasmus went to Paris from More's residence at Bucklersbury to see the Praise of Folly through the press. It is likely that the first, and very faulty, edition appeared in the early part of July. The erroneous year-date of 1508 added by Froben in 1522 may possibly derive from an apparent reference in More's letter to Dorp of 1515 to the fact that the Praise of Folly had appeared seven years previously. But the number seven maybe a manuscript misreading.