ABSTRACT
A literary text offering exceptional insights into the practice of women as itinerant healers is Christian Weise’s five-act comedy Der Politische Qvacksalber. It is in a venerable dramatic tradition that draws at least as heavily on literary sources as on the activities of genuine quacks. The contextualization and comparative analysis of quack descriptions and monologues is essential for gaining insights into quack rhetoric as an influence on literary style. The quack troupes of medieval northern religious drama heralded numerous quack-related secular performative texts, including French charlatan monologues, German carnival farces, Russian folk interludes and British mummers’ plays. A French farce dating to around 1510 features a pardoner and a theriac seller who exploit the authority of the Church and of medical science, by peddling goods and services aimed at saving the souls and bodies of their credulous customers. In addition to ointments and drugs, the theriac seller peddles hairs from Proserpine’s head, four phoenix’s feet, part of Cerberus’ head and other pagan amulets, some gathered on a visit to Hell which he recalls with great vivacity. These may be regarded as pagan pendants to the Pardoner’s no less improbable Christian relics. The two charlatans, travelling companions and economic rivals, stop for a meal at an inn. Here they greet the landlady’s revelation, that her husband had earned his living as a talented tooth-drawer, with the enthusiastic response: ‘Sang bieu! He was one of us!’1 This pair inspired the travelling (a)pothecary and pardoner of John Heywood’s mid-sixteenth-century ‘Play called the Four PP’. Together with a palmer and a pedlar, they in effect earned their living as itinerant quacks. The apothecary dismisses the wares of the other three, by praising his chest of pharmaceuticals in a lengthy pseudo-medical harangue. Quoted in part above (in Chapter 8), it is signed off with a flourish of cynical commercialism:
Not one thing here particularly But worketh universally, For it doth me as much good when I sell it As all the buyers that taste it or smell it.2
