Medical Meta-language: Renaissance Commentaries and Poetics on the Healing Nature of Satire

Abstract

Although the Roman satirists emphasised their curative role and identified themselves with doctors, they did not use medical images as persistently as their Renaissance counterparts. This does not mean that the medical analogy would have been forgotten in the Middle Ages; on the contrary, medieval authors and commentaries on Roman satire also drew attention to medical terms (Witke 1970, p. 188; Kindermann 1978, pp. 60–3). But it has been stated that in sixteenth-century theoretical statements on satire, the genre’s functions, methods and nature were expressed almost exclusively in medical terms, which did not occur in any other genre. Furthermore, Mary Claire Randolph proposed that this imagery went out of fashion later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when vices were no longer characterised as ulcers but as ruling passions that needed to be tempered by reason and judgement rather than healed by a physician-satirist (1941, pp. 125–6). Rationalistic terminology replaced the physical terms that had been common in earlier Renaissance discussions of satire. It was thus in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century theoretical works on satire that the medical task was most widely acknowledged. In this Chapter, I will take a closer look at this Renaissance commonplace about satire’s therapeutic function.¹