Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

acknowledgments
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In the fourth chapter of my book Pleasant Places, published in 2000, I discussed
laughter in the general context of recreation and its role in the
thought and society chiefly of seventeenth-century Holland. In the
present study, I examine the subject of laughter more closely, shifting
the purview to the Southern Netherlands of the sixteenth century and
focusing on Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Antwerp of his day. In doing
so, I return to several subjects treated in more summary form in some
of my earlier publications. My ideas concerning Bruegel’s peasant revels
were first adumbrated in a small book of 1977 and further developed in
a volume of the Franklin D. Murphy Lectures, published in 1991 by the
University of Kansas, while the chapter on Bruegel’s Dulle Griet expands
a short paper presented at a Bruegel symposium in Berlin in 1975 and
published several years later, in 1979. Representing my second thoughts
on these two topics, their treatment here continues the discourse of those
earlier eªorts and in the case of the Dulle Griet may be said to supersede it.
If “second thoughts are ever wiser,” I can only hope this old saying may
continue to hold true.
During the final stages of preparing this book, in November 2003, I
had the great privilege of presenting some of its major themes in the
Twelfth Gerson Lecture, sponsored by the University of Groningen,
which published it as The Art of Laughter in the Age of Bosch and Bruegel. I would
like to thank the Gerson Foundation for the opportunity to speak before
an interested and informed audience, and my thanks go also to the
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