Four Fools in the Age of Reason: Laughter, Cruelty, and Power in Early Modern Germany

Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World marked a watershed in the study of early modern European popular culture in general, and folk humor in particular.¹ No doubt influenced by the paradoxes of his own time and place—Soviet culture was at once both incredibly suppressive and full of humor—Bakhtin used his study of Rabelais to demonstrate that early modern carnivalesque elements, including folk festivities, common rites and cults, clowns, fools, giants, dwarfs, and jugglers, did not just function as entertaining distractions from “real life.” Rather, such elements formed part of the period’s own life principle, means by which early modern people related to each other and sites where truth and power relations were unmasked and imaginatively recreated. In their different ways, Foucault, Burke, Darnton, and, perhaps above all, Davis each adopted and critically reinterpreted Bakhtin’s fundamental insight. Early modern cultural history as we understand it today is unthinkable without it.^2...