Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

notes to pages 23–24 171
boerden; see Lodder 1996, esp. pp. 147, 161. Cf. Robrecht de Duyvel, a Netherlandish
prose romance published in 1516 after a French version. It can
claim, perhaps, to be morally edifying, since it traces Robrecht’s career from
Devil’s child to man of God, but the hero reaches his goal only after a series
of less-than-edifying but highly entertaining adventures; see Rob Resoort,
ed., Robrecht de Duyvel (Muiderberg: Dick Coutinho, 1980).
64. See Lode Roose, Anna Bijns: Een rederijker uit de hervormingstijd, Koninklijke
Academie voor Nederlandse Taal-en Letterkunde, VIe Reeks, Bekroonde
werken, Nr. 93 (Ghent: Secretariaat van de Koninklijke Academie voor
Nederlandse Taal-en Letterkunde, 1963), p. 342. For some erotic songs,
with their many examples of wordplay of a sexual nature, in an Antwerp
songbook of 1544, see Hermina Joldersma, “‘Het Antwerps Liedboek’:
A Critical Edition,” 2 vols. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1983,
1:XCV–XCVII.
65. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, La bibliothèque de Marguerite d’Autriche. Exposition,
1940, p. 56, cat. no. 123.
66. Pleij 1990, p. 96; Van Brouchoven possessed a copy of Johannes Pauli’s
Schimpª und Ernst; see Van der Feen 1918, p. 90, no. 130. For the presence
of such literature in Dutch libraries, see Van Stipriaan 1996, pp. 82–84,
among them Marnix’s copies of the Decameron in Italian ( p. 84).
67. Quoted in Curtius 1953, p. 422: “Lo spirito allegro aquista più facilmente
la perfezione christiana che non lo spirito malinconico.” Apparently a
great humorist himself, Neri identified his favorite jest book as one by
the fifteenth-century priest and fool Piovano Arlotto; see Beatrice K.
Otto, Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester around the World (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 169–170.
68. On the earthy sense of humor of the upper classes in this period, see
Bowen 1998, pp. 14, 82; and for the seventeenth-century Dutch middle
class in particular, E. de Jongh, “Jan Steen, So Near and Yet So Far,” in
Washington-Amsterdam 1996, pp. 46–47.
69. Burke 1978, p. 26.
70. Welsford 1968, pp. 142–147.
71. Nyeuwe clucht boeck 1983, pp. 67–68, nos. 22–24.
72. Welsford 1968, pp. 144 and 283 respectively. For Tarleton, see also John
Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Phoenix Mill, U.K.: Sutton
Publishing, 1995), pp. 108–109 and passim, esp. 114–117.