Abstract
In early modern Europe, the so-called Gunpowder Revolution progressively changed warfare practices, the experience of embodiment and kinesic imagination. Literature is a key source of evidence for such transformations. In 1517, Folengo writes a macaronic epic that stretches fictionality to new frontiers. His fictionalization of slaughter and radical disembodiment is both strikingly original and eminently topical in the Renaissance period. Kinesic analysis offers a way of addressing such issues, where the historical and the imaginary intermingle to produce unexpected configurations. Rabelais was an enthusiastic reader of Folengo. As doctor and writer, he also responded to the novel modes of early modern killing, delving through fiction into the problems raised by mass violence and the anonymous destruction of human bodies by firearms and artillery.
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Notes
- 1.
Teofilo Folengo used the pseudonym Merlin Coccaie. Ann Mullaney writes in her introduction to her translation of Folengo’s Baldo , “Folengo clearly reached a large public. One enthusiastic reader was François Rabelais (1494–1553), also a one-time Benedictine monk, who borrowed episodes from Baldo and adapted many of Folengo’s traits, such as his predilection for synonyms, his use of long lists and fictional authorities, his occasional intromission of the authorial “I,” and his devotion to the bottle.”; see Teofilo Folengo, Baldo, trans. Ann E. Mullaney (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2:vii. A French translation of Baldo was published in 1606 as the Histoire macaronique de Merlin Coccaie, prototype de Rablais [sic], signalling in its title Folengo’s influence on Rabelais. A well-known borrowing is the episode of Panurge and the sheep. Also, “the French writer honours Folengo by placing him last on the long list of books in the Library of St. Victor: Merlinus Coccaius, De patria diabolorum (Merlin Cocaio, On the Devil’s Country), right after Antidotarum animae (Antidotes for the Soul)”; see Folengo, Baldo, trans. Mullaney, 1:xviii. The first edition of Baldo came out in 1517 and the last in 1552, several years after Folengo’s death in 1544. Mullaney uses Mario Chiesa’s edition for her translation, which I cite throughout this essay; Teofilo Folengo, Baldus, ed. Mario Chiesa, and trans. Gérard Genot and Paul Larivaille (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007).
On Folengo’s artistic endeavour and style in his fascinating mix of Latin and dialectal Italian, a linguistic cookery that explains the name macaronic, formed on the name of the Italian pasta macaroni, see Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots: banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: José Corti, 1987), 202–3. See also Marcel Tetel, “Rabelais et Folengo,” Comparative Literature 15, no. 4 (1963): 357–64; A. E. B. Coldiron, “Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation,” in Early Modern Cultures of Translation, ed. Karen Newman and Jane Tylus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 56–75; Barbara C. Bowen, “Rabelais and Folengo Once Again,” in Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. Barbara C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1993), 207–31.
- 2.
See Geoffrey Parker, “The Gunpowder Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of Warfare, ed. Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101–14.
- 3.
Ellen Spolsky, “Elaborated Knowledge: Reading Kinesis in Pictures,” Poetics Today 17, no. 2 (1996): 158–9.
- 4.
My focus is on kinesis and the gunpowder revolution. Therefore I will not discuss the status of religious symbols in the Reformation.
- 5.
J. R. Hale , War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450–1620 (Leicester: Leicester University Press and Fontana Press, 1985), 46. “Gunpowder consists of three ingredients—saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal—the best proportions being approximately 75% saltpetre, 10% sulphur, and 15% charcoal.”; see Kelly Devries and Robert Douglas Smith, Medieval Military Technology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 152.
- 6.
Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 123.
- 7.
Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 123.
- 8.
Regarding Ariosto , complexity and tension are also perceptible, but extra-textually. Indeed, Ariosto’s patron, Alfonso d’Este, was famously keen on developing artillery, and “gained a European-wide reputation as an innovator in the manufacture of powder.” His “court of Ferrara was always among the leaders in the arm race”; see Dave Henderson, “Power Unparalleled: Gunpowder Weapons and the Early Furioso,” Shifanoia 13–14 (1992): 110, 116. Piero Floriani calls Alfonso d’Este “l’un des plus grands artilleurs de son temps”; see his “Guerre et chevaliers ‘avec reproche’ dans le Roland Furieux,” in L’Homme de guerre au XVIe siècle, ed. Gabriel-André Pérouse, André Thierry and André Tournon (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1992), 298.
- 9.
Michael Murrin, History and Warfare, 125.
- 10.
Murrin, History and Warfare, 125.
- 11.
Murrin, History and Warfare, 128.
- 12.
DeVries and Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 144–45.
- 13.
Maurice Keen “The Changing Scene: Guns, Gunpowder, and Permanent Armies,” in Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 280.
- 14.
DeVries and Smith, Medieval Military Technology, 156.
- 15.
François Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 101; François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 318. All subsequent references are to this edition and translation are supplied in parentheses.
- 16.
DeVries explains that “It was not until 1460 that any surgical manual even mentions gunshot wounds, and it was even later before these wounds are given specific and distinct treatment in surgical writings.”; Kelly DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 7 (1990): 133.
- 17.
“In 1536, at the siege of Turin, French military surgeon Ambroise Paré changed surgical history. At that time, it was the custom to treat gunshot wounds by pouring boiling oil into them, often without removing the fragment or bullet. Paré, having run out of this cauterizing mixture, was forced to use a non-abrasive digestive to treat some of his wounded patients. This surgical procedure ultimately proved that gunshot wounds should not be treated by cauterization. Gunpowder weapons, however, had been in use for more than two centuries before Paré’s discovery”; see DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice”: 131. See also Jean Céard, “La médecine de l’homme de guerre à la Renaissance,” in L’Homme de guerre au XVIe siècle, ed. Gabriel-André Pérouse, André Thierry and André Tournon (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1992), 229–40.
- 18.
Ambroise Paré, La manière de traiter les plaies, ed. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France et Genève, 2007), fol. aa ii.
- 19.
Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 123.
- 20.
Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 212: “The poem survives in a single manuscript of about 1440, but was probably composed in the form in which we now have it about forty years earlier.” … “The manuscript is Lincoln Cathedral MS91, written by Robert Thornton,” hence called the Lincoln Thornton. It is even likely that the poem was “composed over a considerable period of time, through a process of accretion and revision familiar to medieval literature, and that it embodies a kind of historical layering, with level laid on level.”
- 21.
Hale , “Gunpowder and the Renaissance,” 120: “The chivalrous contempt for firearms as a coward’s weapon had been anticipated by a scorn for missile weapons that went back to the Greeks.” Hale provides examples from Euripides and from various early modern texts written in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and England. Guns were deemed both cowardly and devilish. However, opinions were more nuanced in England, owing to the crucial role played by longbows in the Hundred Years War. “English pride in her missile troops, the archers, meant that while Englishmen could condemn guns as being devilish or deride them as inefficient, few thought of them as cowardly” (122). See also Evelyn Tribble, “Where are the Archers in Shakespeare?” ELH 82 (2015): 789–814.
- 22.
On this logic of embodiment, see Guillemette Bolens, “La momification dans la littérature médiévale: L’embaumement d’Hector chez Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Guido delle Colonne et John Lydgate,” in “La pelle umana/The Human Skin,” ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, special issue, Micrologus 13: 213–311; Guillemette Bolens, La Logique du corps articulaire: Les articulations du corps humain dans la littérature occidentale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007), “Introduction.”
- 23.
The Alliterative Morte Arthure: The Death of King Arthur, trans. Simon Armitage (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2012). All references are to this edition, with line numbers supplied in parenthesis.
- 24.
The English king Edward III used cannons “to create noise and panic” in the battle of Crécy during the Hundred Years War and “by 1400 gunpowder weaponry appeared in nearly every engagement of the war”; see DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice,” 135.
- 25.
Floriani, “Guerre et chevaliers,” 295: “Le développement rapide de l’art de la guerre n’implique pas … un changement aussi rapide des conceptions et des valeurs qui sont liées à la guerre: l’idéologie nobiliaire de l’aristocratie européenne, pour laquelle la valeur individuelle est la seule mesure du jugement militaire, impose encore ses lois.” [The rapid development of the art of war does not imply … a correspondingly rapid change in the mentalities and values linked to war: the noble ideology of the European aristocracy, for whom individual value was the sole measure of military judgement, continues to dominate.]
- 26.
DeVries, “Military Surgical Practice,” 136: “This interest in gunpowder weaponry increased as the war progressed. As guns became more numerous and more accurate and powerful, more soldiers were killed and wounded. Small guns fired metal balls, usually made of lead or iron, and larger guns fired stone balls, especially fashioned for that purpose. Gunshot wounds from both these weapons could be and were often fatal; metal balls could pierce the skin, while larger stone balls could kill on impact with the body or by splintering into fragments which would then enter the torso or limbs. Sometimes in medieval chronicles these fatalities are unnamed, mostly because of their low station, but on other occasions gunshots killed more prominent victims. In 1383, at the siege of Ypres, a ‘very brave English esquire,’ Louis Lin, was killed by a cannon shot. In 1414, the Bastard of Bourbon was killed by gunshot at Soisson. In 1438, Don Pedro, the brother of the king of Castille, was decapitated by a gunshot during the siege of Capuana at Naples. […] Finally, in 1460, James II of Scotland died when one of his large cannons exploded next to him. Perhaps the most famous death by gunshot during the Hundred Years War occurred in 1428 when Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury and leader of the English forces in France, ‘a worthi werrioure amonge all Cristen men,’ was killed at Orleans when a stone cannon ball fired from a bombard (the largest type of siege gun) shattered and mortally wounded him in the head.”
- 27.
On Folengo’s poetry, see Coldiron, “Macaronic Verse,” 56–75.
- 28.
Folengo, ed. Mullaney, 1:xvii: Folengo “borrows and distorts many of the names of Dante’s devils.” See also Marcel Tetel, “Rabelais et Folengo: De Patria Diabolorum,” in “Rabelais en son demi-millénaire,” ed. Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin, special issue, Études Rabelaisiennes 21 (1988): 203–24. One of the devils in Folengo is named Bombarda: i.e. cannon.
- 29.
On fictionalizing acts, see Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
- 30.
Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary; Ellen Spolsky, The Contracts of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Ellen Spolsky, “Why and How to Take the Fruit and Leave the Chaff,” SubStance 30, 1/2 (2001): 177–98.
- 31.
Perceptual simulations are central to the cognitive efforts that ground kinesic intelligence; see Guillemette Bolens, The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012).
- 32.
For the French original, see Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, 79.
- 33.
Florence Weinberg, Rabelais et les leçons du rire: Paraboles évangéliques et néoplatoniciennes (Orléans: Paradigme, 2000), 74.
- 34.
Weinberg, Rabelais et les leçons du rire, 75.
- 35.
Anthony Russell writes that, “Like Rabelais, Folengo wrote a mock-epic informed by the spirit of evangelical radicalism central to reformist ideology. Both authors, moreover, levelled some of their most savage satire against the absurdities of theological discourse. Both were monks who left their monasteries on account of their heterodox beliefs and who spent much of the remainder of their lives as wanderers, either defending, concealing, or apologizing for those beliefs.” Russell further remarks that “the Baldus would have constituted for Rabelais the only example of a fictional work written in the epic mode with an explicit contemporary reform polemic as one of its central motivations.” See Anthony Presti Russell, “Epic Agon and the Strategy of Reform in Folengo and Rabelais,” Comparative Literature Studies 34, no. 2 (1997): 119–48.
- 36.
Guy Demerson, L’Esthétique de Rabelais (Paris: Sedes, 1996), 136–37. See also Guy Demerson, “Violence: Humanisme et facétie,” Europe 757 (1992): 67–79.
- 37.
Weinberg, Rabelais et les leçons du rire, 74.
- 38.
In La Logique du corps articulaire, I analyse the logic of embodiment that is extant in the Iliad. Some aspects of embodiment in Virgil’s Aeneid are discussed in Guillemette Bolens, “Le corps de la guerrière: Camille dans l’Enéide de Virgile,” in Körperkonzepte/Concepts du corps: Contributions aux études genre interdisciplinaires, ed. Franziska Frei Gerlach, Annette Kreis-Schinck, Claudia Opitz, Béatrice Ziegler (Münster: Waxmann, 2003), 47–56. For more on the logic of embodiment, see also Guillemette Bolens, “Continuité et transformation des logiques corporelles,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 25 (2003): 471–80.
- 39.
Paré, La manière de traiter les plaies, 11.
- 40.
Jean-Charles Sournia writes of this scene “Bien entendu Rabelais use et abuse de tous les procédés. Il ajoute les spondyles aux vertèbres, alors que vertèbre est un vieux mot français compris de tous, quand spondyle est nouveau et inconnu des lecteurs, d’autres fois il prend un mot pour l’autre” [“Of course Rabelais uses and abuses every trick in the book. He attaches the spondyls to the vertebrae, when in fact ‘vertèbre’ is an old French word understood by everybody, whereas ‘spondyle’ is new and unknown to his readers; at other times he uses the one for the other”], “Le vocabulaire médical de Rabelais,” in “Rabelais pour le XXIe siècle,” ed. Michel Simonin, special issue, Études Rabelaisiennes 33 (1998): 293.
- 41.
Spolsky, Contracts of Fiction, 18.
- 42.
Spolsky, Contracts of Fiction, 18.
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Bolens, G. (2018). The Gunpowder Revolution in Literature: Early Modern Wounds in Folengo and Rabelais. In: Banks, K., Chesters, T. (eds) Movement in Renaissance Literature. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69200-5_6
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