Land of Cockaigne

Abstract

In Le voyage et navigation que fist Panurge, disciple de Pantegruel aux Isles incongnues et estranges (1538), attributed to Denis Johennot, Panurge advises not to show the Flemish the land of plenty he has discovered. Everything there consists of food. The mountains are made of butter, the rivers of milk and the roofs of little warm tarts. However large that paradise on earth is, Panurge is afraid that the Flemish would eat it all. It is a fascinating comment, which matches the large presence of the metaphor of the Land of Cockaigne in different media in the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands. Already twelfth century Latin texts mention the existence of a muslim paradise, where the christian could temporarily exchange his values and spirituality to indulge in a delightful and voluptuous life on earth. In the second half of the thirteenth century the theme returned in a French poem. Two Dutch poems about this land of Cockaengen are dated from around 1400. A Dutch text in prose, probably from 1546 and printed in 1600, sums up which delicacies tantalize people in this Luye-lecker-landt: a thousand sugared cakes, five hundred sponges, forty-six roasted chickens, a buckwheat mountain, cooked pears which in winter are dusted from heaven with powdered sugar, fish which swim prepared in the river, geese and woodcocks, roasted piglets with a knife in the side for an easy service and numerous cheeses.