Natural fools and the historiography of Renaissance folly

Author(s): Paromita Chakravarti

Source: Renaissance Studies , APRIL 2011, Vol. 25, No. 2 (APRIL 2011), pp. 208-227
Published by: Wiley

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Renaissance Studies Vol. 25 No. 2 DOI: 10.1111/j.l477-4658.2010.00674.x

Natural fools and the historiography of

Renaissance folly

Paromita Chakravarti

Across Europe, along the drift from Renaissance to Reformation, . . . s

gigantic protagonists, the rogue and the fool ... It is the age of Erasmus
Rabelais, and Cervantes. It is a time to cry 'Ducdame' and call all fool
circle [Harry Levin]1

. . . after playing a minor role on the stage throughout the late Middle A
fool] steps forward at the height of the Renaissance to assume one of t
roles in life's drama ... he gives articulation to the doubts and uncerta
one of the great ideological upheavals in human history . . . [Walter K

Something new appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance;

will occupy a privileged place there: the Ship of Fools, a strange 'drun
that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish c
[Michel Foucault]3

Chroniclers of folly, both traditional and iconoclastic, agree on t

tousness of the fool's appearance in Europe, on the cusp between
medieval values and an emergent Renaissance ethos, as a spokesper
icon of the new age, identified with its defining philosophical m
humanism. The texts and contexts of folly were developed by
scholar-reformers like Cusanus, More and Montaigne, by its ideologues,
Erasmus and Burton, and Rabelais, Shakespeare and Cervantes, its literary
practitioners.4 However, the relationship between humanism and folly was
complex. While Erasmus and his fellow humanists were indeed 'praisers of
folly', making it a personal credo, their attitudes to fools, particularly natural
fools, remained ambivalent. This paper will explore some of these ambiguities
of the humanists' association with foolishness. In doing so it will question the

1 Harry Levin (ed.), Selected Works of Ben Jonson (New York: Random House, 1938), 12.
2 Praisers of Folly (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), 11.
3 Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, abridged version trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1988, first pub. Random House, 1965), 7.
4 Erasmus' Praise of Folly sets the tone for the prolific literature of folly which includes works as diverse as
Nicholas de Cusa's Idiota, More's Utopia, Montaigne's essays, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, Shakespeare's
portrayal of stage fools, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Cervantes' Don Quixote. For the purposes of this
essay, these varied texts will be referred to generally as the 'praise of folly' genre.

© 2010 The Author

Renaissance Studies © 2010 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 209
lopsided historiography of Renaissance folly which tends to focus exclusively
on the philosophical and literary representations of the morosoph rather than
on the medical, legal, folkloric, anthropological and terratological accounts of
the natural fool.

The semantic and ideological multivalency of both Renaissance 'folly' (gen

erally identified with madness and idiocy, but also evoking innocence, poeti
or divine ecstasy, boorishness, piety, cultural difference and sexual promiscu
ity) and 'humanism' (including diverse civic, courtly, Neoplatonist and
Christian strands) makes generalizations about their relationship problem
atic. Since humanist 'praises' exploited the ambivalence of 'folly' (which
carried both negative and positive connotations in classical and Christian
traditions)5, it is difficult to gauge precise meanings or attitudes. Also, the
genres typically used by humanists, like the formal dialogue or mock
encomium were ironic and dialectical, thus resistant to unilateral readings.
Despite these caveats, it may broadly be asserted that the fool's position as
licensed truth-teller appealed to many humanist writers. As radical critics of
intellectual, political, religious and social orthodoxies, they appropriated the
language of folly, combining jest and earnest, to critique tradition and cor
ruption with the fool's irreverence and immunity. This strategic deployment
of folly emphasized its uses as a role, a political stance, a cult, a philosophy and
an ars vivendi. Thus in humanist texts, folly is often a guise, used symbolically
as a metaphor for human life rather than an intellectual or psychological
debility. The medieval trope of Everyman as fool deluded by earthly vanities,
was transformed into a more celebratory image of the human condition in
Renaissance humanist works.6 Erasmus' Stultitia comments: 'the whole of
human life is nothing but a sport of folly.'7 Burton asks, 'For indeed who is not
a fool, melancholy, mad?'8 The sixteenth century world-map framed within a
fool's cap bears the inscription Auriculus asini quis non habet?, 'Who does not
have asses' ears?'9 The idea is also encoded in versions of the proverb, 'A mad
world, my masters', used by Middleton as a title for his 1608 play. Pauline
doctrine which underpinned Christian humanism reinforced the literary
trope of universal folly.10 Paul's call urging Christians to embrace Christ's

5 With contradictory connotations in classical and Christian traditions, folly referred to unworldly wisdom in
Socratic philosophy (See The Apology of Socrates, Phaedrus, Ion) and Pauline Christianity, positing meanings very
different from madness as divine punishment for sin in Greek tragedy or the Old Testament (See M. A. Screech,
'Good Madness in Christendom', in Roy Porter et al. (eds.), The Anatomy of Madness, Essays in the History of
Psychiatry, 3 vols. (London: Tavistock, 1985-88), Vol. 3, 25-39).
6 The trope of universal madness has classical origins in the Stoic maxim, lInsaniunt omnes praeter sapientem ,
in Horace's lDoceo insanire omnis and Mantuan's first Eclogue, commonly quoted in the Renaissance, 'Id
commune malum; semel insanivimus omnes .
7 The Praise of Folly and Letter to Maarten Van Dorp 1515, trans. Betty Radice, with an introduction and notes by
A. H. T Levi (London: Penguin, 1971), 102.
8 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols., (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932), Vol.1, 39.
9 Bodleian Library, Oxford: Douce Portfolio 142.92. Reproduced in John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the
English Court (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1998), 118.
10 See 1 Cor:l: 18-28; 2:18-20; 3:9-13. Authorised Version, 1616.

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 210 Paromita Chakravarti

unworldly folly was adopted by Erasmu

the Catholic Church, mired in Scholast
tion. Thus folly, politicized as a means
philosophized as a metaphor for human
hension, was central to humanist beliefs, but remained removed from the
pathological and psychological experience of mental deficiency.
Thomas More, laughing, Socratic philosopher, Erasmus' friend and dedica
tee of his Praise of Folly, whose name lent the book its Latin title Encomium
Moriaef was a man who lovedjests,12 employed a household fool13 and made his
Utopians lovers of fools.14 Yet, in his Apology, More describes, with uncharacter
istic lack of sympathy, how he punished a deranged man, an ex-Bedlamite, who
disturbed his parish Church by making 'madde toyes and tryfles':

I. . . caused him ... as he came wanderyng by my dore, to be taken by the

constables and bounden to a tre in the strete byfore the whole towne, and there
they stryped hym with roddys therfore tyl he waxed wery and somwhat lenger.15

Although a stray instance, it reveals some of the reservations that humanists

had about the irrational, disorderly and uncivil. The literary 'praise of folly'
did not necessarily suggest sympathy for the pathologically foolish or insane.16
This contradiction explains the coexistence, in humanist thought, of an inclu
sive politics based on a symbolic, universalized folly on the one hand, with the
alienation of the natural fool, on the other.
Primarily an elitist educational programme, based on values of reason,
reform and culture, Renaissance humanism remained uneasy with the asso
ciations of folly with the 'natural' - with primitivism, ignorance and sexuality,
even while deploying these values to critique institutional authoritarianism. It

11 In the Preface, Erasmus bids 'learned More' to be 'a stout champion of your namesake Folly' [Praise of Folly,
Preface, 61].
12 See Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of St Thomas More, trans. Philip E. Hallett,
(London: Burns Oates, 1928), 132-44.
13 See Noeline Hall, 'Henry Patenson - Sir Thomas More's Fool', Moreana XXVII, 101-02, May, 1990, 75-86.
14 'They [Utopians] have singular delite and pleasure in foles. And as it is a greate reproche to do annye of
them hurte or injury, so they prohibite not to take pleasure of foolyshnes.' [Thomas More, Utopia and the
Dialogue of Comfort (London: J. M. Dent, 1910, repr. 1935), 87].
15 Thomas More, The Apology, ed. J. B. Trapp, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of Thomas More, Vol. 9 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 118.
16 While literary criticism of More emphasizes his valorization of fools and folly, histories of psychiatry mark
out the incident described in Apology as demonstrating the period's cruelty towards the mad and foolish. For D.
H. Tuke, in Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles (London: Kegan Paul, 1882) the incident
'illustrates so graphically the whipping-post treatment of that day' (57). In Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine
(eds.), Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (1535-1860) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), the incident
exemplifies how 'pauper lunatics were generally classed with vagrants, beggars and disorderly persons and dealt
with in the same way, since madness meant socially intolerable behaviour' (5). George Rosen in Madness and
Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness (London: Routledge, 1968), 140-41, relates the incident
to demonstrate how the mad were flogged. These history of psychiatry accounts provides an alternative to the
prevalent historiography of folly which regards the Renaissance and particularly the humanists (like More) as
being peculiarly tolerant to fools.

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 211
is the witty jester or the artificial fool with command over language and
culture who becomes the humanist spokesperson, rather than the natural fool
and his variants - the 'monster', savage, clown, wild man, bedlamite or native.
Rarely featured in Renaissance praises of folly, these figures remain outside
the pale of the educated, rational, male, European civic society which defines
the humanist understanding of the 'human'. It is the discourse of 'naturals',
often glossed over by historians of Renaissance folly (who tend to focus more
on the philosophical and literary representations of the wise fool) which
reveals how, despite celebrating the levelling effects of a symbolic, 'universal'
folly, Renaissance humanism remained exclusionist. Neither uniformly affir
mative nor unique, humanist attitudes to folly thus share the prejudices about
the foolish attributed to earlier and particularly, later times. Although histo
rians connect the discourse of folly with humanist emancipation from scho
lastic orthodoxies, the rupture was perhaps less absolute. Continuities also
existed between Renaissance and Enlightenment attitudes.
Much of the traditional scholarship on folly, as well as more recent work
characterize the Renaissance as a period of tolerance of and interest in
irrationality (see quotes above). Huizinga writes: 'The figure of Folly, of
gigantic size, looms large in the period of the Renaissance . . . People laughed
loudly and with unconcern at all that was foolish. . . ,'17 This laughter does not
ridicule but accepts foolish ridiculousness as well as risibility as an aspect of the
human condition: 'In the Renaissance, Christian laughter swept into promi
nence, aided by the conviction that man is a laughing animal.'18 Rosen
observes how folly pervades both Renaissance life and literature : 'Folly and
madness had become integral elements of the world of people and things. It
is certainly no coincidence that the literature of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries is so rich in the portrayal of distraught and insane
characters. Quixote, Lear, Ophelia . . ,'19
The Enlightenment however, is regarded as introducing the reign of secular
Reason which banishes the fool from the hospitable environment of the
earlier age, making him an outcast. Zijderveld remarks on the '. . . reforma
tion and Enlightenment - who won the definitive victory over traditional
folly.'20 In Kaiser's poetic formulation, 'As he goes to Arthur's bosom with the
chimes at midnight ringing for the last time', the quintessential Renaissance
fool, Falstaff, 'in a specific chronological sense, make(s) good his threat and
take(s) with him, if not all the world, at least his sixteenth century world.'21

17 Johann Huizinga, 'The Comedy of Life' in Kathleen Williams (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of The
Praise of Folly (New Jersey: Prendce-Hall, 1969), 61-7, 66; repr. from Johann Huizinga, Erasmus, trans, by
F. Hopman (London: Phaidon Press, 1952).
18 M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Penguin, 1997), 4.
19 Rosen, Madness and Society, 157.
20 A. C. Zijderveld, Reality in the Looking Glass, Rationality through an Analysis of Traditional Folly (London:
Routledge, 1982), 40.
21 Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), 277.

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 212 Paromita Chakravarti

Swain comments: 'with the growth of th

expression, the hgure of the fool lost its
simple clown, dunce, merrymaker.'22 In a
the puritan, the scientist and the captain of
fool in cap and bells who belongs to a 'soci
human inadequacy, efficacious ritual'.2
teenth and eighteenth centuries, mental
social scene in both thought and practice.'2
semicompromise with their nonfoolish b
Renaissance appeared to be fast disappear
The above quotes demonstrate the no
valorization of Renaissance attitudes to fools and the demonization of the

Enlightenment as a period hostile to them. This tendency marks m

riographies of folly (both traditional or Foucaultian) which fail to suf
problematize Renaissance humanist accounts of fools and natur
'praises of folly' need to be re-evaluated and the distinctions that ar
drawn between such encomiastic literature and Enlightenment disc
folly should also be questioned, to better appreciate the porosities of
ages.
Foucault's characterization of the mid-seventeenth century asylum
ment as marking a watershed in the perception of folly, carries a
emotional charge:

Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of
. . . Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained
maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital.26

The transition however was not nearly as abrupt. The freedom that
bestows on the crazed mariners of the Ship of Fool is part of the r
zation of the Renaissance fool enabled by a wealth of literary mate
acterizing him as a metaphoric vestige of an older, stabler world orde
historians of Renaisance folly use humanist literature and contempora
as direct evidence of how fools were treated in real life: 'The presen
Bedlam and its inmates on the stage indicates the acceptance of
within a socially admissible framework. . . ,'27 But Midelfort warns u
this easy identification. He points out for instance, that empirical res
not yielded any records of real ships of fools mentioned by Foucault,

22 Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York: Columbia
Press, 1932), 184.
23 Enid Welsford, The Fool (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 125.
24 Rosen, Madness and Society, 158.
25 William Willeford, The Fool and his Sceptre (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), Introduction, xx.
26 Madness and Civilisation, 35.
27 Rosen, Madness and Society, 158.

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 213

deportations of the mad were not uncommon.28 He indicates how a

to 'symbolic history' often led Foucault to ignore contradictory ma
dence.29 Even the theory of the 'Great Confinement' of the m
seventeenth-century asylums is motivated less by historical facts and m
the need to find a consistent 'essence of an age, its episteme'.30 T
tionalization of the mad was not an exclusively Enlightenment phen
It existed all over Europe, particularly in Spain, through the Middle
the early Renaissance. By ignoring earlier histories of exclusion, F
'grossly exaggerates the Renaissance dialogue with madness'.31 The
leging of the Renaissance praise of folly literature at the cost of
courses less tolerant to fools perpetuates this tendency. To replica
distinctly literary nostalgia for the symbolic wise fool in our empirical
is to perpetuate the humanist aestheticization of Renaissance folly
glosses over the marginalization of the mentally infirm.32
In terms of visibility and care, the madman and fool in the pre
Renaissance milieu were a part of quotidian community life in a p
rather than an idealistic sense. Even as humanists philosophized folly
encomia moriae, laws were formulated in the material realm to identify
distinguish him from the lunatic, and test levels of idiocy to deter
fitness to administer property, enjoy legal immunity or enter an asylum
required medical categorization of degrees of foolishness, examining
with lunacy, humours and physical disabilities; ascertaining its caus
ignored in histories of Renaissance folly which are overdetermined
ist valorizations of the role-playing literary wise fool, these medic
courses taxonomizing fools and madmen, segregating them from
rational society are associated with the 'Age of Reason' instead. Yet a
points out, the reason-unreason dichotomy is 'chronic' to Western
phy rather than being an Enlightenment phenomenon: 'the struct
exclusion which Foucault wishes to describe in his book could not have been
born with classical reason . . . It would be essential to the entirety of the histo

28 H. C. Erik Midelfort, 'Madness and Civilisation in Early Modem Europe: A Reappaisal of Michel Foucault
in B. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylavnia Press, 1980), 247-85, he
254.
29 H. C. Erik Midelfort, 'Reading and Believing, On the Reappraisal of Michel Foucault', in A. Still an
Velody (eds.), Rewriting the History of Madness (London: Routledge, 1992), 105-9, here 106.
30 Midelfort, 'Madness and Civilisation', 259.
31 Ibid.y 253-4, 255.
32 Critiquing Welsford's The Fool and Robert H. Goldsmith's Wise Fools in Shakespeare, both based heavily
literary representations of folly, Willeford shows how they oversimplify the fool in trying to extract 'mean
and attribute 'wisdom or sanctity' to him. So powerful is this humanist construction of the wise-fool that
impedes more complex modes of reading folly: 'This tendency provides a way of understanding the fo
meaning but impairs the mode of seeing him by which we gain access to his life. ... I do not assume that it
be reduced to the neat form of paradox or that it necessarily belongs to the ironic expression of wise truth.' (
Fool and his Sceptre Intro, xxi).
33 William Empson notes that the legal sense of the fool as imbecile emerged almost contemporaneously wi
its meaning as an affectionate dependant. See The Structure of Complex Words (Cambridge: Harvard Univer
Press, 1951; repr.1989), 115.

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 214 Paromita Chakravarti

of philosophy and of reason. Despite

of folly continue to underline a ruptu
foolish between the Renaissance and t
This article, by focusing on material us
of Renaissance folly (although debate
tion this skewed historiography by tr
tices of folly. It suggests the need to e
literature of folly but also the different
Renaissance folly take shape - in the
debates on 'naturals', 'monsters' and n
the over-privileging of literary-philos
sance folly which is itself a humanist
most of our perceptions of Renaissanc
not as they commonly are, as unique l
larger debates on folly, in dialogue wi

HUMAN, MONSTER, NATURAL

In The Tempest, the drunken Trinculo wonders about Caliban: ' "Lord" quoth
he? That a monster should be such a natural!'(3.2.30-1),35 playing on the idea
of the monster as an 'unnatural' creature, juxtaposing it with the colloquial
use of 'natural' to mean an idiot. Trinculo registers mock amazement at the
way Caliban combines these apparently opposed qualities of naturalness and
unnaturalness, idiocy and monstrosity. While his hybrid man-fish appearance
excludes Caliban from the natural realm, his natural folly connects him to it.
Although Trinculo's wordplay opposes folly and monstrosity, Renaissance
discourses of folly linked natural fools and monsters. Representing both fallen
mankind and the unnatural other, the natural fool was a bestial, half-human
creature, moving between the poles of comic inclusion in the pageant of
universal human folly and tragic alienation from human attributes.
The conceptualization of folly as a sign, not of difference, but of identity
with nature draws from the Christian view of it as an attribute, not exclusively
of the fool but of fallen nature. The irrational represent the universal post
lapsarian corruption of reason and are thus 'natural'. However, in other
semantic registers, 'natural' designates the non-rational natural world of
beasts and plants as distinguished from rational man.36 In his simultaneous
connection with and alienation from the human, the natural fool is both like
and unlike the unnatural monster. These conflicting views of folly as both
universal and natural condition as well as an inhuman and bestial one, stem

34 'Cogito and the History of Madness', Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Roudedge, 1978, first
pub. 1967, Editions du Seuill), 48.
35 The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katherine Mauss (New
York: Norton, 1997).
36 C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 49.

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 215
from competing Renaissance notions of the 'natural' and the 'human'. Ar
totelian ideas of nature as norm coexist with the Christian conception o
fallen and irrational nature. Greek definitions of the human as rational
coexist with Protestant scepticism about the limited, even damaged h
reason which makes man scarcely different from animals. With its tw
cies of classical philosophy and Christianity, humanism works with con
tory constructions of the 'human' and the 'natural'. Humanist discou
natural folly is allied to discourses of the monster, the wild man, th
World native and the child. These figures, like the natural fool, are
between the natural and unnatural, rational and irrational, primitive
infantile, both included and excluded in the 'human' category. Drawn
sometimes conflicting sources (medical, theological, legal, New W
debates and folklore) these allied discourses contribute to the humanist
ambivalence towards the natural fool.

UNNATURAL NATURAL: MONSTERS AND FOOLS

The word 'monster' referring to an imaginary, unnatural, hybrid

had a specific meaning in classical and Renaissance medical discou
for congenitally 'malformed' children who appeared to be 'unn
Aristotle had defined monsters as human offspring who do not resemb
parents.38 Monsters blurred species differences, disrupting natura
did natural fools, who appeared to lack what sixteenth-century ph
regarded as defining human traits: language, reason and moral re
ity.39 Donne describes the Dunce as a form of brutish, recalcitrant mat
unshaped by the human faculties of reason or intellect, 'who would
soule were nothing but the bare temperature of his body'.40
Medical discussions clubbed fools with 'monsters', the mentally
with the physically disabled. Paracelsus associates fools with the cri
Zacchias, papal physician, connects them with the deaf-mute. The f
like the monster's, was inscribed with 'misgrowths': 'a fool is a mar
therefore they are also malformed.'41 Swiss historian Josias Simler

37 Renaissance teratologist, Ambroise Parré, says: 'Wee call Monsters, what things soever are b
contrary to the common decree and order of nature. So wee terme that infant monstrous, which
one arme alone, or with two heads.' See The Workes of Ambroise Parey, trans. T.Johnson (Londo
38 Aristotle, The Generation of Animals, 4.4.770b; trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (Camb
University Press, 1963), 425.
39 See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 32. Fools we
with beasts in the Renaissance art of Physiognomy. See Jonathan Andrews in 'Begging the Quest
the Definition and Socio-Cultural Meaning of Idiocy in Early Modern Britain: Part 2', History of P
1998, 179-200, here 182-95.
40 John Donne, 'The True Character of a Dunce', in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of
(Modern Library: New York, 1946), 293.
41 See Paul F. Cranefield and Walter Federn, 'The Begetting of Fools: An Annotated Translat
sus', De Generatione Stultorum , Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 41 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
63, 66.

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 216 Paromita Chakravarti

tolly and monstrosity in his description

region, 'who hardly deserve to be nam
food . . . walked naked the whole winter, and various monstrosities of this
sort'.42 Felix Platter, one of the first doctors to connect thyroid-induced physi
cal deformities with mental deficiency, lists the manifestations of folly in the
appearance and behaviour of natural fools:

. . . the head is sometimes misshapen; the tongue is huge and swollen; they are
dumb; the throat is often goitrous . . . they present an ugly sight. . . sitting in the
streets and looking into the sun . . . putting little sticks in between their fingers,
twisting their bodies in various ways, with their mouth agape . . ,43

In theological discourse the fool and monster were related through their
linking of the bestial and the human. Old Testament Proverbs connect fools
with animals: 'A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass/and a rod for the back
of fools' (26:3).44 Despite the Pauline valorization of the spiritual fool, medi
eval and Renaissance Christianity underlined the ambiguity of the natural fool
and monster asking questions such as: Why were fools and monsters born? Did
such creatures have souls? Could they be saved? What was the function of such
mockeries of Creation? Christian writers usually explained their existence by
referring to the Fall. Although deviants in worldly terms, fools or monsters
represented postlapsarian man and were thus quintessentially human and
natural. Augustine writes:

Indeed, if nothing deserving punishment passes from parents to infants, who

could bear to see the image of God . . . adorned with the gift of innocence
sometimes born feeble-minded, since this touches the soul itself? . . . those
whom people call 'morons' are so dull by nature that some have as little wit as
cattle? Yet you do not wish to say that from the beginning, when the human race
deserted God, it contracts the offense of its condemned origin.45

Augustine's 'bovine' moron is like all Christians, an inheritor of Adam's sin,

not a bestial 'other' but a reminder of what any man could be. In City of God,
using the same argument, Augustine assures that the disabled bodies of mon
sters would be perfected in afterlife as others' were.46 The Protestant vision
of fallen humanity, indistinguishable from fools and monsters reaffirmed

42 Josias Simler, Vallesiae descriptio, libri duo (Tiguri: Froschouer, 1574) fols. 3b and 4a. Quoted in Paul F.
Cranefield, 'The Discovery of Cretinism', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol.36, Nov-Dec 1962, 494.
43 Felix Platter, Praxeos, seu de cognoscendis, praedicendis, praevendis curandisque ajfectibus homini incommodantibus
tractatu s . . . (Basel, 1602-8), Vol.1, pp.95-6. Quoted in Cranefield, Ibid; 496.
44 See also Prov. 26:11 and 17:12. In 26:7, the fool is compared to the physically disabled.
45 Augustine, Contra Julianum Pelagianum, Lib.III, iv, 10 (Patrologia Latina, 44:707), trans. M. A Schumacher,
Saint Augustine Against Julian, in R.J. Deferrari et al. (eds.), The Fathers of the Church. A New Translation, Vol. 35
(New York: Fathers of the Church, inc., 1957), 115.
46 City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson with an introduction by David Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972), 22: 19, 1061.

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 217
Augustinian ideas. Paracelsus, the anti-Aristotelian physician influenced by
radical Protestantism universalizes and naturalizes folly and monstrosity by
tracing the genesis of fools and monsters to the postlapsarian moment:

. . . when they [Adam and Eve] came out of Paradise, they were . . . corruptible,
mortal, distressed . . . they saw . . . many deformations of their children. . . .
crooked children came into being, there blind ones, there deaf ones . . . there
fools, there monsters . . ,47

Paracelsus asserts that our 'wisdom is nothing before God ... all of us in our
wisdom are like the fools'48 and the fool is one of us.
Donne rationalizes the existence of monsters as a proof of the 'variety of
nature'49 implying that though anomalous, they were natural. This follows
Pliny's description of monsters as 'lusus naturae (sport of nature),50 who
provide entertainment as fools do. Clubbed together as recreational objects,
a dwarf, fool and madman provide a 'solazzo in Ariosto's Satire V; the her
maphrodite, dwarf and fool sing and dance in Jonson's Volpone. Natural
fools, like monsters, were considered freaks and 'folly' also meant a prodigy
or curiosity, commonly used for the fantastic seventeenth-century baroque
houses.51
Natural philosophy considered both fools and monsters as accidents of
nature who challenged the laws of heredity. Following Aristotle's definition of
monsters as offsprings not resembling parents, Juan Luis Huarte comments
on the birth of natural fools:

... of wise parents, are borne foolish children, and of foolish parents, children
very wise . .. And amongst children of one selfe father and mother, one
prooveth simple, and another wittie.52

Huarte suggests that fools, like monsters, were conceived through defects in
the maternal imagination which influenced the foetus so powerfully that the
father's seed, the legitimate and rational embryonic principle, was over
whelmed, giving rise to children defective in body and mind. Such creatures
bore no mark of the father but displayed the imprint of their foolish and
irrational mother's desires and experiences at the time of conception and
pregnancy. Thus fools and monsters are, in a certain sense, unfathered

47 Cranefield and Federn, 'The Begetting of Fools', 61.

48 Ibid., 59.
49 Donne, 'The True Character of a Dunce', 294.
50 See M. Martinet, 'Les Monstres Images de la Folie et de L'Irrationnel dans la Littérature de la Renaissance Anglaise',
in M. T. Jones-Davies (ed.), Monsters et Prodiges au temps de la Renaissance (Paris: Université de Paris-Sorbonne,
1980), 17-25, here 17.
51 See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S.C. Weiner, 20 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989, repr., 1991 with corrections), Folly, 5 a.
52 Juan Huarte, Examination of Men's Wits, trans. Richard Carew (London, 1594), 306.

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 218 Paromita Chakravarti

changelings, their mother's sons, or

Elizabethan English.58
Although both theological and medic
and natural fools, physicians (influenc
a separate species) emphasized the inh
gians (particularly Protestants) stress
However, exceptions like Paracelsus, a
tian view which too was divided. These contradictions influenced the human

iststs' ambivalence towards natural fools, regarded both as unnatural mon

and fellow sufferer of the Fall.

WILD MEN, FOOLS AND NEW WORLD NATIVES

The conjunction of monstrosity and folly was most spectacularly noticed in the
figure of the 'wild man' who had both folkloric and Scriptural incarnations.
Associated with fertility like the ritual fool, this inarticulate, woodland crea
ture was a 'monster', more bestial than human.54 The 'wild man' was por
trayed in medieval literary descriptions as the 'salvage' or savage. The 'wild
man' myth was strengthened by scriptural accounts of Nebuchadnezzar's
bestial forest existence, punished for his folly by God55 as well as the positive
examples of Christian saints practicing asceticism in the wilderness (John of
Chrysostom, captured by hunters who took him for a beast or Francis of Assissi
living among wild animals).56 Contradictory ideas of Nebuchadnezzar's besti
ality and ungodly folly and the unworldliness of the wild 'fools of Christ'
constituted the complex blend of the irrationality and monstrosity of the wild
man. These figures were perhaps inspired by the actual practice of abandon
ing disabled or mentally challenged children in the woods.57 In the eighteenth

53 See C. F. Goodey in 'John Locke's idiots in the natural history of mind', History of Psychiatry V, 1994, 215-50,
here 227-34. See Paul F. Cranefield, 'The Discovery of Cretinism', 494-5, n. 15 for why the fool is colloquially
called a 'cuckoo' (or 'kookie'), a 'changeling' bird which substituted its eggs for those of another bird.
54 The club wielding Green Man dressed in vines, still seen on English pub signs, is a reminder of pagan
fertility rites. The Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a variant of such a figure. See Welsford, The
Fool, 70-72 for the association of the fool with fertility rites. Legends of Welsh prophets like Lailoken, Merlin
and Irish gelts conflate Wild Men with pagan forest deities and magic-wielding fools. (Welsford, The Fool, 97,
103-5). The fool's connections with the wild man is preserved in the jester's and harlequin's use of animal skins,
foxtails and cockscombs (Willeford, Fool and his Sceptre, 18-19).
55 See Hayden White, 'The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea', in Edward Dudley and M. E. Novak
(eds.), The Wild Man Within, An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to the Reformation (Pittsburgh:
Pittsburgh University Press, 1972), pp. 3-38, here 14; Penelope Doob, Nebuchadnezzar's Children: Conventions of
Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 134^207.
56 Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), Wild Men
in the Middle Ages, 17; John Saward, Perfect Fools (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 84.
57 For etymological connections between lunacy and the woods see Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages,
12, 191 n.26, for Malory's use of the word 'wylde' as frenzied. Also the Anglo-Saxon word 'wode' means mad.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Demetrius describes his distraction in the forest as 'wood within this wood'
(2.1.192).

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 219
century, anthropological and philosophical interest was directed at these fera
children.
As civilization's banished other, the wild man shared the traits of another
'natural', the New World 'native' being 'discovered' by sixteenth-century
Europeans.58 Travellers' and colonists' accounts of the 'uncivilized' and 'mon
strous' people of the New World and theological, medical and philosophical
writings about natural fools converge significantly. Strategies of understand
ing known forms of deviance like folly, deformity and insanity were deployed
to explain the otherness of New World natives.59 Thus the discourse of Renais
sance folly must be situated in larger debates on nature and culture, civility
and savagery, folly and rationality, monstrosity and humanity which inform
discussions of the native. The fool must be studied alongside other outsiders
of European civilization, like the alien, the savage and the monster who
compelled a Eurocentric humanism to question its definition of the 'human'.

THE SPANISH DEBATES

Greenblatt describes the discursive strategies used by European e

and colonizers to characterize the 'native' as opposed to each othe
Mandeville's and Herodotus' accounts involve 'some form of accep
the other in the self and the self in the other', Columbus' and Bernai Diaz's
descriptions proceed from 'identification to complete estrangement: for a
moment you see yourself confounded with the other, but then you make the
other an alien object. . . that you can destroy or incorporate at will.'60 This
dual distancing and familiarization of natives characterizes sixteenth-century
European justifications of the processes of colonization and evangelization
too. While conquistadors stressed the natives' otherness to legitimize their
own brutalities, missionaries portrayed them as rational and humane, tojustify
conversion, since non-humans could not become Christians.
Renaissance debates about the natives' humanity can be traced back to
medieval scholastic disputations about the 'monstrous' races listed by Pliny61,
in which the colonizers and missionaries were divided. These concerns reap
peared urgently in the context of sixteenth-century Spanish attacks on South

58 Both 'natural' and 'native' derive from Latin 'natus' or birth and refer to a state untouched by culture. For
connections between the Wild Man and native, see Stanley L. Robe, 'Wild Men and Spain's Brave New World',
Wild Man Within, 39-53.
59 Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), 199-253, shows how 'Old World'
travel narratives and Greek romances shaped descriptions of the New World. See John Pitcher, 'A Theatre of
the Future: The Aeneid and The Tempest', Essays in Criticism 34, 1984, 193-215.
60 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),
135.

61 See J. B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1981), 178-96. Different standards were set for adjudging the humanity of these exotic races - Roman law
regarded the human form; Christian canonists, the soul; and Aristotelians, reason as the essence of mankind.
Other criteria of clothing, language, domesticating animals, religion, civil society and government were also
used.

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 220 Paromita Chakravarti

America, which incited debates about th

'Indians', their readiness for Christiani
arguable justice of the Spanish plunder
focused on the natives' humanity. If the
unethical and unchristian. If however, th
fall into the category of Aristotle's 'natura
or property.62 But this would make also
evangelical project who therefore insiste
Most Christian defences of the Indi
reason and intelligence as attributes of t
premises were as Aristotelian as their o
the other side. The Dominican Francisco de Vittoria admits two conditions

under which natives could be deprived of their right to property - if they w

proved to be animals (insensati) or idiots (amentes). But in fact the nat
were:

Not of unsound mind, but have according to their kin

son . . . they have polities . . . marriage and magistrates, over
shops, and a system of exchange, all of which call for the u

Vittoria argues that even if the Indians were proved t

fools, the Spanish conquest would still be unjust. Alth
that the Athenians were the wisest people could be int
the wise should rule over the foolish, this was not ne
Writing to the pope, the Dominican Julian Garces den
dores who, 'in order to slake their thirst for wealth . . . insist that rational
creatures made in the image of God are beasts and asses', and praises the
native children's ability to read and write Spanish and Latin, concluding:
'They are justly called rational, they are completely intelligent and possessed
of judgement.'66 Garces's defence of the natives partly prompted the passing
of the papal bull Sublimis Deus (1537) forbidding the treatment of Indians as

62 Aristotle, Politics, Books I, 2-6. See Anthony Pagden, 'Dispossessing the Barbarian: the Language of
Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of American Indians', in A. Pagden (ed.), The
Language of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 79-98,
here 85.

63 However, missionaries' opinions differed. Many considered the natives incapable of Christianity. In 1517,
Cardinal de Cisneros wrote: 'they [Indians] are not capable of natural judgement or of receiving the faith . . .
and they need just as th e . . . beast does, to be . . . governed by Christians who treat them well and not cruelly'
[quoted in Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartoleme de Las Casas and fuan Gines
de Sepulveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of the American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1974), 11.] The Dominican, Tomas Ortiz, declared the natives incapable of learning before the
Council of Indies. Betanzos declared before the same council that Indians were incapable of reason and
Chrisdanity. Although he retracted his statement, doubts about the evangelical project continued.
64 Delndiis et deJuri Belli: Relectiones. Quoted in Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (London: Hollis
and Carter, 1959), 22-3.
65 See De bello contra insulanos. Quoted in Pagden, Political Theory, 93.
66 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, 20.

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 221
'dumb brutes' and asserting that they were 'truly men'. But the controversy
about their intellectual capacities continued.
A national debate was held in Valladolid in 1550 to decide whether the

American Indians were human, and the Spanish conquest justified.

testants were Bartolemé de Las Casas, a Dominican missionary, and the
humanist scholar Juan Gines de Sepûlveda, the emperor's chaplain and royal
historian who had studied Aristotle at the University of Bologna. Septilveda's
dialogue, Démocrates secundus, denied any rights of dominium to the natives and
justified their conquest on grounds of their 'natural rudeness and inferiority'
and low understanding. Their effeminacy, idolatory, fractiousness and canni
balism indicated that they were not quite men, only 'homunculi' (little men)
who had no:

. . . vestiges of humanity, who not only possess no science but who also lack
letters.

. . . Neither do they have written laws but barbaric institutions and customs.68

By referring to the natives as 'little men' Sepülveda drew upon the tradition of
infantilizing the native going back to medieval characterizations of pygmies as
childish men representing an earlier stage of human development.69 This
description of natives as partially rational like the young, both men and not
men, helped to explain their simultaneous difference from and identity with
Europeans. This theory also offered a more Christian perspective. Domingo
de Betanzos described the Indians as immature and irrational like children;70
Vittoria called them 'unrational', with potential for reason, who could there
fore enjoy partial property rights.71 But for Sepülveda, the infantalization of
the native did not merely suggest a difference in degree of intelligence, but an
absolute difference of kind: 'In prudence, talent, virtue and humanity they are
as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men . . . monkeys
to men.'72
Las Casas refuted Sepûlveda's claims in Apologia, using his opponent's
description of Indians but arguing that their childish status called for nurture
rather than assault.73 He also indicated the theological problems of supposing,
as Sepülveda and others did, that God would create a race of partially rational
creatures who 'should be called barbarians, savages, wild men and brutes.'74
They in fact had civil society and just governance comparable to the wisest

67 Ibid., 21.
68 Ibid., 85.
69 Friedman, Monstrous Races, 191.
70 Hanke, All Mankind is One, 19.
71 Pagden, Political Theory, 84-5.
72 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, 84.
73 Quoted in Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 112.
74 Quoted in Hanke, All Mankind is One, 82.

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 222 Paromita Chakravarti

'Greeks and Romans, in adherence to th

ready 'to receive the gospel'.76 The nat
and arts as Sepulveda had claimed. Las C
their architecture and painting which a
are 'mechanical arts' which humanists
natives also excelled at traditional libera
writing.
The debate about the Indians' educability centred around their rational
capacities. Before the Council of the Indies, Dominican, Tomas Ortiz con
demned the Indians as being 'more stupid than asses', 'incapable of learning'
and devoid of the 'humane arts or industries'.78 In 1544, Betanzos urged
Charles V to disallow Indians from being ordained as priests since they were
incapable of learning the faith:

Indians should not study because no benefit may be expected from their edu
cation. . . . Indians are not stable persons, to whom one should not entrust the
preaching of the Gospel.79

Those who had experience in teaching the natives refuted these charges.
Alonso de Zorita, described how liberal arts like music, reading and writing
flourished among Indians.80 Dominican Santo Tomas, compared the Peruvian
Indians' language to Latin. In his Preface to Grammatica (1560) he invoked
Aristotle's dictum, 'there is no better way to judge the genius of a man than in
the words and language that he uses' to prove that Peruvians had 'great
culture and order'.81 The humanist emphasis on linguistic ability as a marker
of humanity and civility informed discussions about the natives' capacities and
status. Zorita cannot see 'any reason for calling them barbarians' because they
have 'good Latinists and musicians'.82
Las Casas was reluctant to accept not only the Indians' 'barbarism' but the
existence of barbarians anywhere, since it would undermine the Christian
principles of man's perfectibility and the unity of species, implying that 'God
became careless in creating so immense a number of rational souls and let
human nature ... go astray'.83 It seemed like a frustration of the divine plan to
'find one whole nation . . . slow-witted, moronic, foolish or stupid' without
'sufficient natural knowledge and ability to rule and govern' itself.84 Even if

75 Ibid., 77.
76 Ibid., 76.
77 Ibid., 74.
78 Ibid., 11-12.
79 Ibid., 26.
80 M., 131.
81 126.
82 Ibid., 132.
83 Ibid., 77.
84 Ibid., 84.

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 223
such races existed, war against them would still be unjust since, Las Casas
concludes, quoting John of Chrysostom:

. . . there is no natural difference in the creation of men, so there is no difference

in the call to salvation . . . whether they are barbarous or wise, since God's grace
can correct the minds of barbarians so that they have a reasonable understand
ing. He changed the heart of Nebuchadnezzar to an animal mind and then
brought his animal mind to human understanding.85

RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT DEBATES

The issues raised in the Spanish debates about the native recur in R
legal and medical discourses on the status of the natural fool. These
eighteenth-century constructions of folly, suggesting continuities
humanist and Enlightenment attitudes rather than the disjunction
by Foucault's thesis. Described as monsters, idiots (idiots; stulti),
(locos) New World natives shared traits of natural fools and monst
tions of property rights for fools, idiots and monsters revisit disp
natives' rights to dominium - are they human? Can they enjoy the sam
as others? These issues did not surface in the Enlightenment, but
histories of discrimination and segregation of the mad and foolis
thirteenth century, England passed statutes granting the king custody
belonging to congenital idiots or natural fools (fatuorum naturaliu
1540, the Court of Wards and Liveries took over the responsibility
istering the properties of idiots and lunatics. Intelligence tests were de
determine fitness for managing property. The Court would take
property of those

. . . who cannot count or number twenty, and tell who was his father or m
nor how old he is, so that may it appear that he hath no understanding or
what shall be for his profit, or what for his loss.87

Legal distinctions were made between degrees and forms of folly

congenital stupidity (fatuitas a nativate), witlessness (dementia n
imprudence (stultitia), inability to distinguish between good and evi
mali et boni) and temporary madness (non compos mentis suae).88 Howe

85 Ibid., 96.
86 The king had custody of the lands for the fool's lifetime, 'taking their profits without waste,
their necessaries . .. and after their death must return them to the rightful heirs.' Quoted in Nigel
and Insanity in England, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968), Vol.1, 25.
87 A. Fitzherbert, Natura Brevium, (1652), 583; quoted in John Charles Bucknill and Dani
Manual of Psychological Medicine: Containing the History, Nosology, Description, Statistics, Diagnosis, P
Treatment of Insanity. With an Appendix of Cases (London: John Churchill, 1858), 94.
88 See Nigel Walker's discussion of the legal writing of Mathew Hale, Coke and Dalton on p
criminal laws for idiots in Crime and Insanity, Vol. 1,.35-51.

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224 Paromita Chakravarti

State's right to administer fools' propert

fitness to manage property were questio
Eugenic anxieties about generational t
disabilities of fools and monsters echoe
marriages between Europeans and nativ
of fools and monsters focussed on why
means of preventing such anomalous b
inheriting disabilities.91 Zacchias disall
(labelled 'mindless') and the deaf (includ
gate because 'they beget children like t
commonwealth that sound and . . . p
natives, the physically and mentally im
society, enjoying only partial rights. T
criteria such as linguistic ability,93 num
bility95 and participation in civic cod
natural folly or idiocy96 were based on
have sufficient understanding to know a
by teaching or information, he is not a
Enlightenment medical discourse drew
the natives in determining degrees of
disability. Willis says some fools have pr

89 Contemporary plays depict the corruption of the Cou

to greedy relatives who cheated them of their property,
(1618) issued byjames I criticises the Court of Wards for re
and for farming out idiots' estates to relatives who negl
married some in meane places, committed wastes and sp
and Ida MacAlpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry
Illness and Government Policy in Sixteenth and Seventeenth C
90 Spanish historian Oviedo disapproved of Spanish-Indian
how a sailor, Rodiriguez, was exiled for acting as an inte
91 Paracelsus' treatise on fools explores the theological
monsters. Huarte's Examination of Men 's Wits examines ho
C. F. Goodey, 'John Locke's Idiots', pp.227-34.
92 Paulus Zacchias, Quaestiones medico-legales (Rome, 162
Forgetful, and Bereft of Memory'; Paul F. Cranefield and
and Deafness', in Saul Jarcho (ed.), Essays on the Histo
Publishers, 1976), 118-36, here 120-21.
93 The notion of the 'barbarian' or cultural other was pr
was considered incapable of language and civic life. See Ian
Modern England', Shakespeare Quarterly, 49.2 (Summer, 19
enment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 57-70;
the Definition and Socio-Cultural Meaning of Idiocy in Earl
I, pp. 65-95, here 71-2.
94 Both fools and natives were considered capable only of
on how idiots could only be taught mechanical arts.
95 Folly was considered an incurable condition and fools
the Question', I, 87, 91-93 and Hanke, All Mankind is On
96 Although used interchangeably with idiocy, folly is a m
than the more pathological 'idiocy'.
97 Fitzherbert, Natura brevium (1653), 583. Quoted in J

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 225
they were 'able enough for Mechanical Arts', others were 'only able to learn
what belongs to eating or the common means of living', and 'others merely
Dolts or drivelling Fools' unable to understand anything or 'do anything
knowingly'.98 The hierarchy of liberal and mechanical arts in assessing mental
capacities and rational abilities echo discussions of the Indians' educability.
Anticipating Willis, Zacchias, an earlier physician, also defines degrees of folly
according to learning abilities:

In some persons one merely discerns . . . indolence of intelligence which

renders them unfit to obtain . . . the first beginnings of education, some
mechanical skills, manners, some civic regulations. . . . Such persons we call
ignorant and unlearned . . . This ignorance or obtuseness is the rudiment and
beginning of folly.99

He describes the second degree of folly as a failure of reason and language:

These persons .. . seem to exist below the condition of human nature with
respect to the use of reason. They are hardly taught to speak and are known to
be incapable ... by their very speech they make plain that they are fools (fatui),
because by talking (Jando) they show their imperfection . . ,100

Regarding imperfect speech as a marker of folly derives from humanist iden

tification of linguistic ability with rationality and civic life, central to the
discussions on the natives' intellectual abilities.

Disputes about whether fools and monsters had rational souls, could be
baptized or saved revisit the theological controversies about the native
capacities for Christianity. Paracelsus' treatise on fools wonders about the
divine rationale of creating the mentally and physically disabled using argu
ments similar to Las Casas' speculations on why God would create barbaric
races. Thus Enlightenment medical and legal discourses are anticipated in
earlier discussions, not perhaps in the literature of humanist folly, but in other
debates of monsters, natives and naturals. This conflation of the fool, monster
and the native has important implications for Renaissance folly and its asso
ciations with cultural primitivism. The natural fool was not only outside civ
society but perhaps pre-dated society. Attitudes towards this anthropologize
version of folly were divided between alienation and acknowledgement. Fool
monsters and the exotic races were seen as trapped in some form of psych
logical and spiritual infancy which made them, like children, part of the
human species, yet dissimilar in their capacities and manners from other
Like the native, described as 'homunculus', the fool was frequently compar

98 Thomas Willis, De anima brutorum (Oxford, 1672), trans. S. Pordage, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul o
Brutes, which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man (London, 1683), 212.
99 Paulus Zacchias in Cranefield and Federn, 122.
100 Ibid., 126.

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 226 Paromita Chakravarti

to a child. This was in line with both

accounts of folly as childishness. Willis sugg
to be taught through repetition and rote
or Blockheads, do not readily learn the co
than Children the first elements of letters'.102 Zacchias classifies the mildest
kind of folly as corresponding to the intellectual level of a fourteen-year-old
and the more severe variety to seven-year-olds who are 'of an altogether
childish intelligence and delight in childish things, as for instance: "To play at
odd or even, to ride on a long reed." '103 This is taken up in later legal
definition of the idiot as one who 'hath not so much wit, as a Child of ten or
eleven years old'.104
Representing the infancy of mankind, the idiot holds a key to understand
ing history, both in terms of the development of the individual and of civili
zation. As such, he assumes great importance in Enlightenment philosophy,
although these discussions have older origins. Locke for instance, uses the
idiot to demonstrate that there were no a priori innate impressions as the
rationalists claimed:

It might be very well expected, that innate Principles should be perfectly known
to Naturals. . . . But alas, among Children, Ideots, Savages and the grossly illi
terate, what general Maxims are to be found? What universal Principles of
Knowledge?105

Devoid oi Innate ideas and sense impressions, possessing little memory and
rudimentary verbal abilities, the idiot occupied the threshold between nature
and civilization, providing a living example of the individual and collective
childhood of man, demonstrating the processes of memory and language
learning and their role in defining the 'human'.106 He was, consequently, at
the heart of the Enlightenment project of constructing a speculative natural
history, which would explain the origins of institutions like the State and trace
human progress from primitivism to civilization. Conjectural histories of the
development of polity from a hypothetical 'State of Nature' by Locke, Rous
seau, and Hobbes, and attempts to trace the origins of language and culture

101 Leah S. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1978), 11-12.
102 Willis, Concerning the Soul of Brutes, 213.
103 Zacchias, 126. The fool's interest in trifles is discussed in connection with the infantalization of natives.
Zorita however argued that Indians' childish interest in acquiring trifles in exchange for gold was comparable
to the Spaniards equally childish hunger for gold (Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 50). In More's
Utopia, children play with pearls and gems, since these were considered worthless in Utopia. When the
Anemolian ambassadors visit, dressed in expensive clothes and jewellery, a Utopian child wonders why adults
should be dressed in children's trinkets like a 'great lubbor'. His mother suggests that the ostentatiously dressed
man was the king's fool. ( Utopia and the Dialogue of Comfort, pp.68-70).
104 John Brydall, Non Compos mentis: or the Law relating to Natural Fools, Mad-Folks and Lunatick Persons (London,
1700), facs. repr. Of 1st edn. (New York: Garland, 1979), 9.
105 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), Book I, Ch. 2, 64. Also Book I, Ch.2, 49.
106 See Goodey, John Locke's Idiots', 215-50.

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 The historiography of Renaissance folly 227
by Adam Smith and Condillac contemplate human beginnings which seem
be embodied and preserved in the idiot. Narratives of feral children, conflated
with the scrutiny of the idiot were useful in understanding the pre-verb
pre-civil, savage existence of our ancestors and the connections between t
natural and the human.107 Although identified with the Enlightenment, these
discussions had earlier incarnations in the Renaissance discourse of naturals.

AFTERWORD: SHAKESPEARE'S CALIBAN

Trinculo's monstrous natural, Shakespeare's Caliban, straddles the di

of natural folly, monstrosity, primitivism and the New World.108 He em
the problems of humanist attitudes towards the natural and questi
categories of the human and inhuman, rational and foolish. Des
otherness, Caliban compels Prospero, the scholar-magus epitomi
humanist quest for knowledge, to acknowledge the thing of darkness
of nature, humanity and the rational self, an image perhaps of the
origins of all men. Although he has clownish traits, Caliban is not th
Renaissance stage fool; nor is he the Shakespearean witty jester. He
instead the pathology of folly and represents the idea of the fool
strous natural. Critical literature on The Tempest, whether liberal-human
new historicist, reads Caliban as a 'natural', a monster or a New World na
but rarely as a fool, suggesting that these discourses remain discrete
sance scholarship. Trinculo's comment on Caliban indicates the
connect them and construct larger and less explored contexts of fol
image of both the medieval monster and New World native, antic gr
and Enlightenment idiot, Caliban belongs to the world of old romanc
as the new world of discovery; of scholastic debates and Enlightenm
losophy. As such he embodies the need to construct a historiography
which looks before and after without over privileging the Renaissa
oversimplifying humanist constructions of folly. The Tempest reminds u
the 'brave new world' appears so only in Miranda's naïve gaze.

Jadavpur University

107 See Bewell, Wordsworth, 57-64.

108 See George Lamming, 'A Monster, A Child, A Slave', The Pleasures of Exile (London: Alison
1960), 95-117.

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