Land Of Cockaigne Research Articles

The Land of Cockaigne: The German Art Market and the First World War*

Abstract This article reconstructs changes in the German art market during the First World War on the basis of an art-price index for the years 1910 to 1918. The art market during the war was closely tied to the monetary deterioration of the German economy, which undermined trust in paper money. Through an analysis of prices and auction reports, this article shows that from 1916 onwards, the public invested in art, evidence that the pattern of expenditure for tangible assets more commonly associated with postwar hyperinflation had already taken off during the war. At the same time, the First World War precipitated the disintegration of a bourgeois milieu of collectors, marking a transition from the traditional market into a modern and rational auction more open to speculative incentives. The inflow of new buyers shook the hierarchies and conventions of the market. Reports published in the auction journal Der Kunstmarkt provide insight into the reactions of insiders from Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum to this transformation. The more visible the monetary value of art, the bigger these insiders’ contempt for newcomers, whom they found guilty of overthrowing the rules of patronage of the old market. Derogatory depictions of new buyers as either investors or war profiteers were a means for insiders to define their own socio-cultural standing at a time of crisis, establishing a pattern that would subsequently characterize many postwar debates on both politics and culture.

Candytown and the Land of Cockaigne: Gastronomic Utopia in <em>The Nutcracker and the Mouse King</em> and Other Children's Literature

Candytown and the Land of Cockaigne: Gastronomic Utopia in <em>The Nutcracker and the Mouse King</em> and Other Children's Literature

Entre el paraíso de la abundancia y el infierno del hambre: mitos y realidades

Between dreams and reality, the land of Cockaigne was a magical country repeatedly imagined and sought for the Early Modern Age. In this fantastic land was not necessary to work and food was plentiful. The myth arose in an oppressed society, which was a relief in these fantasies, though many tried to make it happen, searching in other lands beyond the sea. America became the projection of those dreams.

The American Cockaigne from the Sixteenth Century to the Shmoo and Beyond

ABSTRACT The Cockaigne (sometimes spelled Cockayne or Cokaygne), also known as Lubberland, predates the coinage of the word utopia, with its earliest expression found in classical Greek literature and some of its best-known expressions from the Middle Ages. Sometimes known as the peoples' or peasants' utopia, it was most famously depicted in the 1567 painting known as The Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Breughel the Elder (ca. 1525–1569) or, in English, the medieval poem of that name. A major focus throughout the various examples is an abundance of food. While there have been references to the American depression song “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” as related to the Cockaigne, American expressions of the form have generally not been discussed in the literature. Here I survey the form from the early seventeenth-century immigrant experience through African American responses to slavery and poverty, Native American Indian responses to their oppression, folktales, some children's literature, depressionera songs, the character of the Shmoo in the comic strip Li'l Abner, and some continuations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The Intellectual and the Fool: Piero Manzoni between the Milanese Art Scene and the Land of Cockaigne

The Intellectual and the Fool: Piero Manzoni between the Milanese Art Scene and the Land of Cockaigne

Social justice in the land of Cockaigne

The development of the public health profession is closely intertwined with movements striving for social justice. At no time in history can this be seen more clearly than during the...

Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. STUART B. SCHWARTZ (ed.) The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 2004.

From "Hell" to "The Land of Cockaigne": this is the road one travels when reading the volume of articles edited by Stuart Schwartz, a well-known historian of colonial Brazil and Latin America. "Hell" or "Inferno" is an image often evoked in descriptions of the "Middle Passage" of Africans across the Atlantic and of the life of slaves on the sugar plantations or engenhos in Brazil and the Caribbean.

In Search of Organizational Cockaigne: Identifying the Pillars of the Ideal Organization

The literature on organizations is replete with ideal-type-theories. Most of them take the whole organization as their level of analysis and study the ideal organization from an objective and macro point of view (e.g. the bureaucracy). Less is known, however, about what the ideal organization might look like from the employee's, micro, and subjective point of view. Inspired by the medieval myth of the Land of Cockaigne, immortalised in Bruegel-the-Elder's 1567 painting, this paper presents an empirical study of the perfect workplace, according to the subjective perspective of the individual employee. Seventy-seven subjects from a single organization were interviewed. The only question they were asked was “Please, imagine the perfect workplace. It can be different from any organization you may have known until now. Can you please describe how it looks?” Results suggest that the ideal workplace is imagined on the basis of three interrelated pillars, or sets of elements: spiritual, material and organizational.

Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands

Preface - Introduction: Historical Laughter - Land of Cockaigne - Laughter Embodied - A Cure for the Civilized - The Politics of Joking - Entremets: Turning Bakhtin Upside Down - Censoring Lies - Jestbooks in the Spanish Netherlands - Counter Reformation Humour - Postscript - Bibliography - Index

Errata: "An Interpretation of the Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Breugel the Elder,"

Errata: "An Interpretation of the Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Breugel the Elder,"

An Interpretation of Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Breugel the Elder

An Interpretation of Land of Cockaigne (1567) by Pieter Breugel the Elder

Cockaigne to Diddy Wah Diddy: Fabulous Geographies and Geographic Fabulations

ALTHOUGH the fashion for studies of folktale diffusion has waned dramatically, the origins of Afro-American narratives are the subject of continued debate, a prominent issue in the broader controversy over the sources of black culture in the African Diaspora. While the international associations of American tales are seldom self-evident, the clear affinities between the Afro- and Euro-American samples indeed question the degree to which enslaved Africans and their descendants borrowed from, contributed to, or cooperated in 'European' folklore in the New World. The most recent round in this dispute proceeds from Richard Dorson's claim that only a small percentage of the Afro-American tale repertoire derives from Africa, a position vigorously contested by folklorists and anthropologists who discern a much greater African contribution in New World narrative.' Ironically, both Dorson and his Africanist critics advance their views as affirmation of the viability and vitality of black culture in the hostile Americas, yet both have resorted to untenable generalizations subverted by their abuse of inconclusive and inconsistent tale indexes. In their attempt to quantify the source of the Afro-American sample in its entirety, they have compiled expansive tabulations enumerating 'reports' of various proposed types and motifs from the available bibliographies, though anyone who actually assembles and examines the texts (or rather the accessible texts) cited under a selection of entries from these works soon recognizes that, during the daunting process of preliminary classification for subsequent analysis, indexers have as an expedient constantly classed together transparently unrelated narratives, an aberration that can only be rectified through detailed historic-geographic investigation of individual tale categories. Despite the claims of Dorson and his detractors, the current editions of the type and motif indexes in themselves are patently unreliable as indicators of genetic relations between the stories catalogued therein.2 Moreover, such sweeping surveys of second-hand reports from tentative reference aids create the fallacious impression of the impersonal, wavelike automigration of folktales,3 since these speculations on the 'probable' dissemination of narratives are typically unimpeded by the very cultural conflicts that epitomize the topic; that is, even precluding positive identification of European or African antecedents or absolute demonstration of American origins for individual stories, the contested corpus itself suggests that tradition bearers from inimical cultures found frequent opportunity to communicate artfully, a neglected phenomenon essential to understanding tale-telling and transmission as human activities. The example to be discussed here is particularly intriguing in this regard; according to some black narrators, the tale of the Land of Cockaigne diffused from European to Afro-American oral tradition because of, not in spite of, this antagonism. The proposed tale-type for Cockaigne or Schlaraffenland (Aarne-Thompson 1930) actually subsumes a number of motifs describing a realm of miraculous abundance or employing the familiar theme of the World Turned Upside Down, motifs whose wide distribution and variety suggest that many are independent inventions rather than cognate migrants.

Lucian'sSaturnalia, the Land of Cockaigne, and the Mummers' Plays

THROUGHOUT Europe, from medieval times to the present, there have existed legends of a peasants' paradise where houses are made out of pastries, food falls from the sky right into one's mouth, and no one needs to work for a living-in fact, the inhabitants are paid to sleep. In Germany, this land is known as Schlaraffenland, in Holland as Luilekkerland, in England as Lubberland, in Italy as Cuccagna, in Spain as Cucafia, and in France as Cocagne; from the latter comes the general name of this paradise which I shall use in this paper, the Land of Cockaigne.' Examples of English references to the myth may be found in written sources of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well as in oral tradition. The first record appears in an early fourteenth-century anticlerical satire, The Land of Cockaygne (c. 1305), which exploits some typical motifs for its own purposes:

The Cyrenaican Expedition of Giuseppe Haimann

AbstractIn 1881 the Italian explorer Giuseppe Haimann and his wife made a two-month journey through the Gebel Akhdar from Benghazi to Derna, travelling under the auspices of the Società d'Esplorazione Commerciale of Milan and Haimann's report first appeared in the Bollettino della Società Geografica in 1882. Haimann's sober assessment of Cyrenaica's potential contrasts favourably with the later accounts of Italian journalists and other visitors who in the early twentieth century had their own reasons for presenting Turkish North Africa to the Italian public as a veritable Paese di Bengodi – a Land of Cockaigne. But 30 years before the Italian intervention of 1911, Haimann had come to the conclusion that Cyrenaica – ‘in ancient times so civilised and prosperous’ – might be restored to new life if agriculture, industry and commerce ‘were to be given an effective impulse’.

The Idler's Paradise in Attic Comedy

This article is chiefly concerned with a well-known passage of that extraordinary miscellany, the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, in which the author follows his usual habit of illustrating a thesis by quoting from comedy. In the pages considered here (vi. 267e–270a) he draws his examples from a series of plays now lost—the Plutuses of Cratinus, the Beasts of Crates, the Amphictyons of Telecleides, the Miners and Persians attributed to Pherecrates, the Sirens of Nicophon, and the Thurio-Persians of Metagenes. This string of quotations, full of cookery-book vocabulary, constitutes our main evidence about the comic poets' treatment of the theme of the land of Cockaigne, Schlaraffenland, the idler's or glutton's paradise. On the basis of this evidence many sweeping generalizations on this subject have been made, some of them so wide of the mark that it may perhaps be worth while to attempt one more review of a passage already often discussed, in the hope of arriving at a fresh assessment of its true significance.Discussion of such a passage usually involves study of the extracts cited, and leads on to the hazardous business of trying to form some conception of the plays from which they are drawn. But before one follows this well-trodden path there is a more general question to be considered, the answer to which may give some guidance on the way. What is it that Athenaeus' quotations illustrate? The speaker in this part of the symposium, the philosopher Democritus of Nicomedia, has been discoursing about servants, and has already cited the Savages of Pherecrates to show that there was a time when people had no slaves, but did all their own work (263 b).

Dionysiac Magic and the Greek Land of Cockaigne

Dionysiac Magic and the Greek Land of Cockaigne