Abstrakt: | Declamatio sub forma judicii can be found in the Graudenz Codex (1731–1740). It is
an interlude that jokingly reports an animal trial. The interlude is a humorous treatment of the
historical trials on animals that continued from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. On
the one hand, such eighteenth-century discussions of animal trials continued the medieval tradition.
This would confirm the diagnosis about the existence of the “long Middle Ages”, especially
in Central and Eastern Europe, where the cultural trends could be somehow belated in comparison
to those in the West. On the other hand, perhaps writing about animal trials in the eighteenth
century was already a form of medievalism. High culture propagated anthropocentrism in its
thinking about animals, while folk culture entailed anthropomorphism. In animal trials animals
are treated as subjects to the same regulations as humans, which means that they were seen as
very much similar to humans. The eighteenth-century interlude recreates this tradition, but it is
a source of satirical laughter. |