Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 24:2 (2023) ► pp.276–301

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Disenchantment of the word in sixteenth-century Dutch farce

ORCiD logo with link | University of Groningen
Published online: 5 September 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.20010.kra
Abstract
Representations of exorcism in farces written and performed in the sixteenth-century Low Countries at first sight merely testify to their authors’ propensity for the grotesque and critical stance towards Roman Catholic rituals. This paper argues that these farcical exorcism episodes, besides ridiculing exorcism and expressing scepticism in matters of demonology, also undermined beliefs concerning the potency of language. Analysis of the ritual as represented in farce and the metadiscursive comments surrounding it points to a conception of the ceremony as “administering” inherently powerful words to an object. This conception is also reflected in a contemporaneous “speech act theory” avant la lettre which attributes autonomous powers to words. Viewed against a backdrop of historical and ethnographic documentation on this type of discourse, this notion is likely to be an outgrowth of perceptions underlying ritual discourse activities cross-culturally. Discrediting the belief that words are capable of affecting reality autonomously, the playwrights may have advocated an understanding of language as a fully man-made instrument, the use and efficacy of which are entirely human-controlled processes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Initial explorations of the representation of exorcism ritual in farce
  • 3.What was being presented as “laughing matter”?
  • 4.Explicit primary performatives and other meta-talk in exorcism episodes
  • 5.Historical lineage of ritual discourse practices
  • 6.Ritual talk as regimented vocal action
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (76)
References
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius. 1651. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. (Translated by John French.) London: Gregory Moule.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, Judith H. 1996. Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. (Translated by Elena Izvolskaja.) Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baudy, Dorothea. 2006. “Ethology”. In Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg (eds), Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, 345–359. Leiden: Brill. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life”. Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1): 59–88. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bax, Marcel. 1999. “Ritual Levelling: The Balance between the Eristic and the Contractual Motive in Hostile Verbal Encounters in Medieval Romance and Early Modern Drama”. In Andreas Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds), Historical Dialogue Analysis, 35–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. “Ritual Discord and the Contractual Framework: An Essay on a Paradoxical Framing Device of the Early Modern Theatre and its Foundation in Oral Tradition and Mimetic Culture”. Semiotica 132 (1–2): 25–74. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. “Rituals”. In Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds), Handbook of Pragmatics, 483–519. (Volume 8: Historical Pragmatics.) Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice. 1974. “Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?” European Journal of Sociology 15 (1): 54–81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Braekman, Willy L. 1997. Middeleeuwse witte en zwarte magie in het Nederlands taalgebied. Gecommentarieerd compendium van incantamenta tot einde 16de eeuw [‘Medieval White and Black Magic in Dutch-speaking Regions: Commented Compendium of Incantamenta until the End of the Sixteenth Century’]. Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1999. “Notes on Old English Charms III: Corn on þa Fet”. Neophilologus 83 (4): 623–636. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles. 1996. “The Meaning of Nonsense, the Poetics of Embodiment, and the Production of Power in Warao Healing”. In Carol Laderman and Marina Roseman (eds), The Performance of Healing, 185–232. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Peter. 1971. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity”. Journal of Roman Studies 611: 80–101. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1981. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Byville, Eric. 2011. “How to Do Witchcraft Tragedy with Speech Acts”. Comparative Drama 45 (2): 1–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, Stuart. 1999. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan and Elena Semino. 2000. “Constructing Witches and Spells: Speech Acts and Activity Types in Early Modern England”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1): 97–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Blécourt, Willem. 1994. “Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition”. Social History 19 (3): 285–303. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Waardt, Hans. 1986. “Toveren en onttoveren” [‘Performing Magic and Countermagic’]. Volkskundig Bulletin 121: 152–202.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1993. “From Cunning Man to Natural Healer”. In Hans Binneveld and Rudolf Dekker (eds), Curing and Insuring: Essays on Illness in Past Times: The Netherlands, Belgium, England and Italy, 16th–20th Centuries, 33–41. Hilversum: Verloren.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “Witchcraft, Spiritualism, and Medicine: The Religious Convictions of Johan Wier”. The Sixteenth Century Journal 42 (2): 369–391. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. 1986. “Self-Evidence and Ritual Speech”. In Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols (eds), Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, 313–336. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1993. “Meaning without Intention: Lessons from Divination”. In Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine (eds), Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, 48–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dunbar, Robin. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro. 1993. “Truth and Intentionality: An Ethnographic Critique”. Cultural Anthropology 8 (2): 214–245. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Epps, Patience and Danilo Paiva Ramos. 2019. “Hup Bi’id Ɨd: Shamanic Incantation at the Nexus of Language and Culture”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 29 (2): 205–212. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Everett, Daniel L. 2017. “Grammar Came Later: Triality of Patterning and the Gradual Evolution of Language”. Journal of Neurolinguistics 43 (201708): Part B 133–165. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Flint, Valerie I. J. 1991. The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gardner, Donald S. 1983. “Performativity in Ritual: The Mianmin Case”. Man 18 (2): 346–360. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gates, Daniel. 2004. “Unpardonable Sins: The Hazards of Performative Language in the Tragic Cases of Francesco Spiera and Doctor Faustus”. Comparative Drama 38 (1): 59–81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gijswijt-Hofstra, M. 1990. “The European Witchcraft Debate and the Dutch Variant”. Social History 15 (2): 181–194. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1979. “Footing”. Semiotica 25 (1–2): 1–30. (Also in: Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk, 124–159. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.) Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goudriaan, Koen and Jaap van Moolenbroek. 2004. Education and Learning in the Netherlands, 1400–1600: Essays in Honour of Hilde De Ridder-Symoens. Leiden: Brill. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hanks, William F. 1996. “Exorcism and the Description of Participant Roles”. In Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (eds), Natural Histories of Discourse, 160–200. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jackson, Howard M. 1989. “The Origin in Ancient Incantatory Voces Magicae of Some Names in the Sethian Gnostic System”. Vigiliae Christianae 43 (1): 69–79.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kallendorf, Hilaire. 2005. “The Rhetoric of Exorcism”. Rhetorica 23 (3): 209–237. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kang, Yoonhee. 2006. “‘Staged’ Rituals and ‘Veiled’ Spells”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16 (1): 1–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. “Unintelligibility and Imaginative Interpretation in a Petalangan Healing Ritual”. Text & Talk 27 (4): 409–433. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 1997. “Religious Language”. Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1): 47–71. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. “Language and Religion”. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 431–248. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kieckhefer, Richard. 1989. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kramer, Femke. 2011. “Capturing Language and Releasing its Spirit: Sixteenth-Century Innovations in Netherlandish Farce”. (Sonderheft: Dialog mit den Nachbarn [‘Special Issue: Dialogue with the Neighbours’].) Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 1301: 329–340.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. “Writing, Telling and Showing Horsemanship in Rhetoricians’ Farce”. In Philip Butterworth and Katie Normington (eds), Medieval Theatre Performance: Actors, Dancers, Automata and their Audiences, 161–178. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. Mooi vies, knap lelijk. Grotesk realisme in rederijkerskluchten [‘Beautifully Disgusting, Wonderfully Ugly: Grotesque Realism in Rhetoricians’ Farce’]. Hilversum: Verloren.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuipers, Joel. 2013. “Evidence and Authority in Ethnographic and Linguistic Perspective”. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (1): 399–413. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laidlaw, James and Caroline Humphrey. 2006. “Action”. In Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg (eds), Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, 265–283. Leiden: Brill. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levack, Brian P. 2013. The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Malinowski, Bronisław. 1966 (1935). Coral Gardens and their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. (Volume 2: The Language of Magic and Gardening.) (Second edition.) London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maxwell, Joseph. 1922. La Magie [‘Magic’]. Paris: E. Flammarion.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mithen, Steven J. 2009. “Holistic Communication and the Co-evolution of Language and Music: Resurrecting an Old Idea”. In Rudolf P. Botha and Chris Knight (eds), The Prehistory of Language, 58–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary Online (oed). 2010. Oxford University Press. Accessed 27 January 2020 at: [URL]
Olbrechts, Frans M. 1925. Een oud Mechels bezweringsformulier [‘An Old Malinois Incantation’]. Gent: Koninklijke Vlaamsche Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Philippa, Marlies and Frans Debrabandere. 2007. Etymologisch woordenboek van het Nederlands [‘Etymological Dictionary of the Dutch Language’]. (Volume 3: Ke-R.) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ramakers, Bart (ed.). 2003. Rederijkers: conformisten en rebellen. Literatuur, cultuur en stedelijke netwerken, 1400–1650 [‘Rhetoricians: Conformists and Rebels: Literature, Culture and Civic Networks, 1400–1650’]. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1982. “The Things We Do with Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act Theory in Philosophy”. Language in Society 11 (2): 203–237. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1975. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse”. New Literary History 6 (2): 319–332. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silver, Susan K. 2005. “Demonic Possession and Poetic Exorcism in Early Modern France”. Neophilologus 89 (1): 23–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1993. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function”. In John Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sofer, Andrew. 2009. “How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in ‘Doctor Faustus’”. Theatre Journal 61 (1): 1–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Staal, Frits. 1979. “The Meaninglessness of Ritual”. Numen 26 (1): 2–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1968. “The Magical Power of Words”. Man 3 (2): 175–208. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1979. “A Performative Approach to Ritual”. Proceedings of the British Academy 651: 113–169.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1990. Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Dijkhuizen, Jan Frans. 2007. Devil Theatre: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Dixhoorn, Arjen, Samuel Mareel and Bart Ramakers. 2018. “The Relevance of the Netherlandish Rhetoricians”. Renaissance Studies 32 (1): 8–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van Haver, Jozef. 1964. Nederlandse incantatieliteratuur: Een becommentarieerd compendium van Nederlandse bezweringsformules [‘Dutch Incantation Literature: A Commented Compendium of Dutch Incantamenta’]. Gent: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Waite, Gary. 1995. “‘Man is a Devil to Himself.’ David Joris and the Rise of a Sceptical Tradition Towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands”. Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 751: 1–13. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 2013. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Webster, Colin. 2019. “The Soundscape of Ancient Greek Healing”. In Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter (eds), Sound and the Ancient Senses, 109–129. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winkelman, Michael. 2009. “Shamanism and the Origins of Spirituality and Ritual Healing”. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 3 (4): 458–489. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina. 2007. “Introduction: Ritual Unintelligibility”. Text & Talk 27 (4): 401–402. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yates, Frances. 1964. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue