What with the Holy War, the bloody infighting in Christianity and the general reports of medieval barbarism, it’s common to perceive the Middle Ages as more pious than the atheistic modern era.
But that might not be so. In a new paper, ‘The Gospel of Deviance’, satire researcher Dennis Meyhoff Brink from the University of Copenhagen has traced the early roots of religious criticism to the 1100s and argues that satire actually played a greater role in the spread of democratic values in medieval Europe than Christianity itself.
The seeds of dissent
It was during the 12th century, slap-bang in the middle of the Crusades, that critical writings mocking the pope and his cardinals, accusing them of ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘greed’, first began to surface.
Literacy rates then were relatively low. “The satire of religion in the Middle Ages was an underground phenomenon, disseminated anonymously by a few learned men. It really took off with the invention of printing in the 15th century and the Reformation in the 16th,” explains Brink.
His thesis documents the crossover of tropes of religious satire into mainstream art and literature.
Engrained in art
“The playwright Molière’s play ‘Tartuffe’ from 1664 is a model example. It exhibits religious authority as deceptive and hypocritical. It was so successful that words like ‘tartuffery’ began to appear in dictionaries to denote hypocrisy,” says Brink.
He posits that this example, and many like it, of change in language and imagination wrought by satire had lasting effects on popular perceptions of authority and the self.
“Satire offers us a different perspective. Especially in the Age of Enlightenment, it gave Europeans the courage to step out of our submission to the state and church. That’s what the Enlightenment philosopher Kant is talking about when he describes the ‘enlightened man’,” he continues.
A formative influence
Brink therefore claims that satire proved to be more influential in the spread of democracy than Christianity.
“Satire is a special form of criticism. It exposes the abuse of power and privileges, and it takes liberties that other types of criticism cannot,” he ventures.
“It was extremely widespread in Europe. It’s very likely that it has had a formative influence on European culture.”
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