The Deluded Sense: Comedy and Theories of Perception from Boccaccio to Descartes

Abstract

This dissertation examines the theme of sensory delusion in early modern Western European comedy (1350-1675). It argues that comedy, in prose and for the stage, offered itself to writers during this period as a genre in which to think innovatively about the human sensorium. Transmitted from Ancient South Asia across the medieval Arabic and Mediterranean worlds to Italy, the comedic tale of sensory delusion provided a means for early modern western European writers to challenge the then-dominant Aristotelian theories of perception and knowledge. While these latter theories hold that the senses, under normal conditions, provide the intellect with truthful knowledge about the external world, the comedic tale of sensory delusion represents the senses as inherently subject to deception. Specifically, the comedy of sensory delusion, as it was adopted and adapted into literary forms from the fourteenth-century Italian novella to the seventeenth-century French theater, articulates a sensorial skepticism that appeals to the persuasive force of language. The senses do not necessarily provide truthful knowledge about the external world and our inner selves because of the power of the human word to misconstruct sensations. According to conventional scholarly narratives, early modern Europe witnessed the development of new ways of knowing the external world and the inner self, leading respectively to the Scientific Revolution and to philosophical and literary expressions of inner subjectivity. Yet at the same time, this dissertation shows, the comedic tale of sensory delusion allowed early modern writers to question the very possibility of discovering the world and the self. For if the sensory knowledge we have of ourselves and the world is mediated through the linguistic communities in which we participate, then, due to the ability of words to deceive, this knowledge is inherently subject to error. In this way, the early modern comedic tradition that this dissertation explores remains relevant to current ways of thinking about the relations between mind, body, and language.