"Moderately Criticize the Vices of Your Time": The Formation of Modern Satire from Brant to Urquhart

Satire has always been a popular way to voice criticism in times of crisis or upheaval. It is anequal opportunity offender that punches up and attacks all abuses perpetrated by powerful authorities. Traditionally linked to classical Roman verse satire, satura, the satirical mode itself can be traced back at least to Aristophanes and ancient Greek comedy. However, it seems thatthe term “satire” was not applied to any form of writing other than satura until the late 15th century where we see it in prose transpositions of Sebastian Brant’s influential Ship of Fools.

The stage is henceforth set for the satirical parasite to infiltrate all genres and describe a mode rather than a genre while paradoxically contributing to the flourishing of verse satire in the Roman tradition throughout the 16 th and 17 th centuries (as attested in Fleuret and Perceau’s extensive anthology from 1922). In France alone, satirists such as Joachim Du Bellay, Mathurin Régnier, and Nicolas Boileau illustrate this trend.

It is undeniable that satire has emancipated itself from these narrow generic boundaries, as it is henceforth defined by its objective, to heal the ills of society. The rediscovery of Lucian’s Menippean satire, of the Greek Satyr play (which facilitated the incorporation of vernacular forms of comical theater into the realm of satire), or of Martial’s epigrams facilitated this broadening of the notion.

I would like to offer a discussion of the major directions that satire is taking in the long 16th century across what is now known as Western Europe, touching on the three essential incarnations that the mode is susceptible of taking: gratuitous, harmless laughter (close to pure entertaining comedy); didactic, constructive laughter (close to a moralizing bent); destructive, polemic laughter (close to the tragic). These attacks will either be straight forward, ad hominem, or subtle, often ironic, attacking either symptoms and perpetrators or root causes and concepts.

Among the main authors, a choice had to be made, and I will mostly touch on Brant, Erasmus, Rabelais, Marot, Du Bellay, Fischart, Nashe, and Urquhart. The example of Fischart and Urquhart, first translators of Rabelais, will be especially enlightening to demonstrate to what extent satire depends on extraliterary circumstances and personal situations of the satirists.