Błazeńskie porady medyczne staropolskich autorów sowizdrzalskich i babińskich

Abstract

The author analyses the topics and motives appearing in Old-Polish poems and prose anegdotes, containing humorous medical advice. She comes to a conclusion that both the environment of roguish writers at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the 17th century “storytellers” from the circle of the humorous association called Republica Babiensis, produces texts the source of which was certainly the same Western-European buffoonish motives of a Rabelais type. However, the context of these works (satirical in the case of rogues and ludic in the case of babiensis authors) is different and dictates a different interpretation. Both the noble and roguish humorists criticize human vices and the flaws of the character by means of absurd and irony, but in the case of plebeian authors criticism is additionally filled with a social subtext.