Four Fools in the Age of Reason: Laughter, Cruelty, and Power in Early Modern Germany by Dorinda Outram (review)

In this fascinating, well-written, and well-researched volume, historian Dorinda Outram examines a neglected aspect of German Enlightenment cultural history, that of the court fool at eighteenth-century German and Austrian courts. Specifically, she examines the careers of four Hofnarren, or court fools: Jacob Paul Gundling (1673–1731) at the court of Frederick William I in Prussia; Salomon Jacob Morgenstern (1708–1785), also at the Prussian court under Frederick William I and Frederick II (the Great); Joseph Fröhlich (1694–1757) at the courts of Augustus II (the Strong) and Augustus III of Saxony and Poland; and Peter Prosch (1744–1804), who served at various courts, including Munich, Vienna, Würzburg, and Ellwangen.

Her study begins with an introduction entitled "Numerus Stultorum Infinitus Est," or "The number of fools is infinite" (1–2), in which she discusses at length the previous scholarship on fools and on the role of courts in the Enlightenment. She also provides a justification for her study by connecting her detailed discussion of the lives and careers of these four specific individuals with the larger scholarly debate surrounding the development, the goals, and the achievements of the Enlightenment, particularly as it manifested itself in the eighteenth-century German lands. Outram points out that the history of fools has been neglected, perhaps because historians, in valuing the "grand narrative" might find the topic of court fools "so remote, so specialized, so over, as to be unlikely to illuminate the great patterns" (4; emphasis in original). Outram's study proves that this is not the case. In examining fools, Outram focuses on reason's "Other" in order to illuminate the project of the Enlightenment. By insightfully analyzing the specificity of each fool's biography, she draws important conclusions about the function of humor, about cruelty, about courtly representation, about the formation of a public sphere, and, indeed, about the Enlightenment. The book devotes one chapter to each of the four fools, and an additional chapter draws connections between the institution of the court fool and the elimination of the foolish character Hanswurst from the German and Austrian stage in the mid-eighteenth century.

Outram's chapter on Gundling clearly demonstrates her thesis that the institution of the court fool was important because it provided "a place where opposites could interact … at a time when more and more energy was being expended on category separation" (128). Gundling was initially hired by Frederick William I as his Zeitungs-Referent, or newspaper reader, a post the duties of which included reading and summarizing important news of current events and foreign affairs in order to present the information to the king and his Tabakskollegium, or group of councillors who met to decide policy over pipes of tobacco. Gundling inhabited several other respectable roles; he was a court historian and the president of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, for example. At the same time, he was treated as the Prussian king's court fool. The process by which he came to be the court fool, however, differs from that of the other fools examined in the book. The king transforms Gundling into his fool, even as he places Gundling in charge of important enterprises such as the Academy of Sciences as well as the duties of reporting on current events and foreign affairs to the Tabakskollegium. Frederick William signifies Gundling's foolishness by requiring him to wear a ridiculously outdated French costume, and he makes Gundling the butt of a variety of cruel jokes, including, for example, having the words "WURM G (WORM G)" (32) embroidered on the back of the coat which he was required to wear, after Gundling expressed criticism of the proposed silkworm industry, of which he was made to serve as the director. The Prussian king also had a painting made, depicting Gundling falling through the ice covering the moat at one...