ABSTRACT
Written in the vernacular, Grewel deliberately targeted a wide lay and medical readership. Even within Guarinonius’s own lifetime, many of his readers failed to understand why a learned medical treatise addressing devout Catholic males should contain any descriptions of secular professional stage business at all, let alone so many, and so scatological in content. His judgment in including this theatrical material was challenged. Few of his readers appreciated the extent to which its inclusion, or the comprehensive programme of changes Guarinonius undertook to enhance it while revising his manuscript, were influenced by the conventions of the late medieval literary genre of moral satire sometimes referred to as folly literature (‘Narrenliteratur’). Inaugurated by Sebastian Brant in 1494, Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas Murner and François Rabelais were among those who contributed major works to this ethically-motivated literary genre. At this time, increasing tensions between canon and civil law precipitated unprecedented literary interest in sin, and popular fear of the Devil as the supernatural, satanic, personification of evil prompted Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum (1486) and the Spanish Inquisition. Folly literature shifted responsibility for malevolent evil and its consequences away from external demons, and towards internal human sins and folly. Variously equating folly with carnival excess, amorality, ugliness and mental instability, the genre camouflages radical social criticism with satirical censure of specific sins.1 Physicians were drawn to folly literature’s healing dimension, its refinement of an influential literary convention dating back to Lucretius, whereby authors drew on quack rhetoric and theories of laughter therapy to present their writings as a literal cure in themselves. This concluding chapter of these investigations into the writings of Guarinonius and the Platter brothers features folly literature in this context.
