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

The fool does not necessarily inhabit a beautiful or romantic world.

Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1935)

This is a book about fools in the Age of Reason, that time running from the end of the seventeenth century to the French Revolution, which began in 1789. It is mostly concerned with fools and fooling at princely courts in Austria and the German states, with sidelights on England, France, and Russia. It tries to understand the nature of these courts through a reconceptualization of fooling, and it puts that fooling against some of the central concerns of the Enlightenment. It examines the life of four famous foolsPeter Prosch (17441804), Salomon Jacob Morgenstern (17081785), Joseph Frhlich (16941757), and Jacob Paul Gundling (16731731), as case studies of the way humoroften black humorwas used as a way of making human community, controlling human waywardness, and strengthening power. Cruelty and the exploitation of the weak by the strong were integral to this humor and will give rise to some difficult moments for readers. This book also carries along with it some thoughts sparked by the writing of history in general, and of a book about fools in particular. It ends with the story of how I, as a fool, came to write this book about fools, a story that contains both cruelty and joy.

This is the first time that these four fools have been studied together, and rescued, I hope, from their half-lives as literary and historical curiosities. It is also the first time that their lives as fools have been examined in the context of Enlightenment, court, and power. Their discoveries about the Enlightenment form the fabric of this book.

Even that most gloomy book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, reassures us, first of all, that the number of fools is infinite (1:15). I am therefore a fool (doubly, for it is also true that anyone who writes about fools must be a fool too), and you too are a fool, dear reader. This book enrolls us all in the company of the foolish, and allows us, as fools in the present, to understand other fools in the past. I make no apology for enrolling myself as a character in this book.

In what voice will we speak about our discoveries? Surely, a quiet one. For this will not be a history built around controversies, where historians lose their tempers, raise their voices, and parade their expertise until it almost dies on a forced march. I do not believe that. It is a statement that smacks of hubris. How can any human creature lay claim to detachment?

What are we studying when we study the history of fools and foolishness? We are studying the lives and work of experts in foolishness, professional entertainers who were by turns buffoons, jesters, and poets, who worked using a combination of crude physical humor and pointed repartee, at large and small courts all over Germany, from the end of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century. These were not the creatures dressed in cap and bells of the medieval and Renaissance periods. They were not the Fool in