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(2010) Intersections in Christianity and critical theory, Dordrecht, Springer.
The glass, the mirror in which early modern Europe was called to contemplate itself was provided in the collected pranks of the jester Till Eulenspiegel, a widely popular and wildly funny book. Eulenspiegel, Eulen-Spiegel, Owlglass: the mirror of the owl. He is the prototype of the satirist, the poignantly ironical critic of society and civilization. Whether or not he is, at his core, a historical figure (Krogmann, 1932/3), his name has become proverbial in German (Röhrich, 1999, pp. 406–7) and has developed into a common noun/adjective – espiègle – in French. Under the name of Dil Ulenspiegel, an archaic, dialectal form, the jester first appeared in print in the printshop of Johannes Grieninger (or Grüninger) in Strasbourg: Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel geboren uß dem land zu Brunßwick: Wie er sein Leben volbracht hatt. The oldest extant printing dates from 1515. Ulenspiegel's early modern German vita was soon translated into several European languages. The Amsterdam printer Jean van Doesborgh (fl. 1505–30) printed the first English translation, of which only a fragment has survived (Brie, 1903, pp. 126–38) and which was reprinted in London, probably in 1528, by Wyllyam Copland under the title A Merye Jest of a Man that was called Howleglas.1 Ulenspiegel has since then appeared frequently and in various guises in literature from Ben Jonson to Hans Michael Moscherosch in the seventeenth century to the Belgian Charles de Coster in the nineteenth to German writers like Gerhard Hauptmann, Wolf von Niebelschütz, Christa and Gerhard Wolf in the twentieth, not to mention his career in children's fiction.
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Full citation:
Lederer, T. (2010)., Dil Ulenspiegel: the inverted gospel and an early modern clown, in C. Falke (ed.), Intersections in Christianity and critical theory, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 89-105.
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