Laughing at Credulity and Superstition in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The early modern time was a period of cardinal changes in European cultures and worldviews. Trade, travel, and exploration, together with the wars of religion precipitated by the Protestant Reformation and the startling new developments in the natural sciences, psychology, and epistemology, shattered the teleologically and hierarchically ordered Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos. With the demise of this worldview went the framework that had existed for some two thousand years allowing Europeans to understand the world, their place in it, their purpose and identity. This was a time of unmasking, dismantling and satirizing of dominant truths, most of all, the truths of Christianity. Laughing, jokes and parodies were tools of reconstructing European identities. The author draws upon a variety of examples from literature and art of the era, mostly on British material.