ABSTRACT
While the 1514 Bozen Passion’s casting of women as quacks was exceptional in medieval drama, its inclusion of quacks, even female quacks, was not. Itinerant quacks were the least respectable and respected medieval healers. Contextualized within the deceitful economy of the secular marketplace, mystery play quacks provide a grotesque dramatic counterpart to the Gospel miracles of Christ, who healed the sick and raised the dead.1 As grotesques and gargoyles proliferated in late medieval northern church decoration, so comic episodes caricaturing the medical inadequacies, cupidity and crude humour of quacks came to dominate its religious stage. By the sixteenth century, the merchant scene had become a standard feature of German Passion plays and inspired numerous Fastnachtspiele, or secular German carnival farces, including at least six in Vigil Raber’s own collection.2 For these, Raber draws heavily on religious drama, freely basing the quack troupe of Ipocras, for example, on the merchant scene’s quack couple, and their servants Rubin and Pusterbalg.
