Four Fools in the Age of Reason by Dorinda Outram;

Author:Dorinda Outram; [Outram;, Dorinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813942018
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2019-01-29T07:00:00+00:00

Portrait of Peter Prosch, the itinerant fool, wearing livery given to him by an aristocratic patron. Artist unknown, 1788. (Tiroler Landesmuseums, Innsbruck; reproduced in Peter Prosch, Leben und Ereignisse)

Prosch described his life in his 1789 “autobiography,” his Leben und Ereignisse (Life and events). This work, in spite of its many editions, has often been treated by scholars as a mere literary curiosity.2 Prosch’s occupation as a fool seemed to remove him from serious consideration by scholars. He tells his story by punctuated anecdotes, “events,” rather than by the flow of history. His resolute unwillingness to wrestle explicitly with the problem of his own identity means that he seemed not to belong in the Romantic era, and his preoccupation with the Herrschaften, the “Lords and Ladies,” seemed out of place in the bourgeois era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prosch’s often scatological humor meant that when the text was reissued in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it could only be in bowdlerized versions. The first complete edition of the text in modern times (though published without the list of subscribers) is that of 1964, which is the one used in this chapter, and the parenthetical page citations refer to the 1964 edition.

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