Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

notes to pages 18–19 167
31. Quoted in Bowen 1998, p. 15; the same passage occurs in Barolsky 1978,
on the title page. The Nouvelles récréations is a collection of stories that has
been described as permeated by the spirit of Rabelais, from whom Des
Périers took the injunction “Live well and rejoice.” Toward the end of
his life, Des Périers was discharged from the queen’s service, not for his
views on laughter, but because she was shocked by his openly expressed
atheism. See Dictionnaire de biographie française (Paris: Librairie Letouze et
Ané, 1932–), 10: cols. 1511–1512. For Castiglione’s influence, see J. Woodrow
Hassel Jr., “Des Périers’ Indebtedness to Castiglione,” Studies in Philology
50 (1953): 566–572. Hassel, incidentally, does not mention laughter
in this connection.
32. Quoted in Burke 1978, p. 26, after C. R. Baskerville, The Elizabethan Jig
(Chicago, 1929; reprint, New York, 1965), pp. 95ª.
33. Castligione 1959, p. 145. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on popular laughter
in the sixteenth century have been widely accepted, but also justly criticized.
See Bakhtin 1968, and the trenchant critiques oªered by Gábor
Klaniczkay, “The Carnival Spirit: Bakhtin’s Theory on the Culture of Popular
Laughter,” in Klaniczkay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation
of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe, trans. Susan
Singerman, ed. Karen Margolis (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990), pp. 10–27, esp. 21–22; Aaron Gurevich, “Bakhtin and His Theory
of Carnival,” in Bremmer and Roodenberg 1997, pp. 54–60; Yelena
Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with
Aaron Gurevich,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1
(Winter 2005): 121–157, esp. 135–138; Jody L. H. McQuillan, “Dangerous
Dialogues: The Sottie as a Threat to Authority,” in Farrell 1995, pp.
61–77; and, above all, Richard M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture
in “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1986 ). See also Verberckmoes 1999, pp. 108–121, in which he turns
Bakhtin upside down, as he puts it.
34. Quoted in Verberckmoes 1998, p. 248. Puteanus delivered this opinion
in a carnivalesque oration at the University of Louvain in 1611, but Verberckmoes
notes his use of traditional arguments in his encomium of
laughter and suggests that his oration was not as paradoxical as the occasion
might indicate. For the oration and its context, see Verberckmoes
1998, pp. 249–250; and Verberckmoes 1999, pp. 172–173.
35. Quintilian, De institutio oratoria, bk. 6.3; see Quintilian 1921–22, 4:438–