Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

168 notes to pages 19–20
501. See also Graf 1997, pp. 29–39. For Folly ’s remark, see Erasmus-Miller
1979, p. 82.
36. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical
Library (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1942), 1:372–419 (2.58.235–71.290). For Castiglione’s
account, compare Cicero: “the essential nature of laughter, the way it is
occasioned, where it is seated, and how it comes into being and bursts
out so unexpectedly that, strive as we may, we cannot restrain it, and how
at the same instant it takes possession of the lungs, voice, pulse, countenance
and eyes—all this I leave to Democritus” (De oratore 2.58.235 [ibid.,
1:373]. Castiglione’s indebtedness to Cicero and Quintilian is also noted
by Barolsky 1978, pp. 4, 6.
37. The influence of Cicero’s De oratore on sixteenth-century discussions of
laughter is emphasized in Bowen 1998, pp. 142–146.
38. Joubert-Rocher 1980, pp. 94–95. Joubert tells us that a translation of
the first book had been published clandestinely more than twenty years
previously, and it has been suggested that the last two books were written
shortly before the 1578 publication (Machline 1998, p. 254). Like
Vives and Erasmus, among others, Joubert counseled moderate laughter.
For convenient summaries of Joubert’s book, see Machline 1998; and
Verberckmoes 1999, pp. 14–17. Useful, too, is Gregory de Rocher, Rabelais’
Laughters and Joubert’s “Traité de ris” ( University: University of Alabama
Press, 1979).
39. Bijns 1875, p. 43 (Refereyn XIII); printed in modern Netherlandish spelling
in ’t Is al vrouwenwerk: Refreinen van Anna Bijns, ed. Herman Pleij (Rotterdam:
Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1994), p. 40.
40. Quoted in Van Stipriaan 1996, p. 36.
41. Nashe, in Terrors of the Night, quoted from Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller
and Other Works, ed. and intro. J. B. Steane (London: Penguin Books, 1985),
p. 216. For Hildegard of Bingen, see Teresa Scott Soufas, Melancholy and
the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1990), p. 37.
42. For a succinct but useful discussion of melancholia and its treatment, see
Laurinda S. Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art
and Medicine (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 197–207.
See also Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression from Hippocratic Times