‘It All Turns to Shit’ – The Land of Cockaigne in Sixteenth-Century German Woodcuts

AbstractCockaigne, the legendary land of plenty, formed a sub-theme of popular depictions of gluttony in sixteenth-century prints. These images combined carnivalesque exuberance and moralising caution, illustrating both excessive consumption and its ill effects, from inappropriately lascivious or slothful behaviour to the physical need to expel from top and bottom. Scatological motifs emphasised the grotesque nature of Cockaigne, providing laughter while also warning viewers of the consequences of gluttonous behaviour in the here and now: that spending on fleeting pleasure will reduce fortunes to shit. These themes are explored here chiefly through an exceptionally large mid-sixteenth-century German woodcut now in the New York Public Library, as well as two related woodcuts by Peter Flotner.Keywords: broadsides; gluttony; grotesque; Land of Cockaigne; scatologyIn the thirteenth century, a new locus of yearning emerged in both written and oral culture across Europe. In this latest land of plenty, gingerbread houses had roofs tiled with pancakes, fences were made from sausages, cooked pigs carried their own carving knives, fried fish swam in rivers of milk, and fountains dispensed the finest Malvasia wine. Its very name reflected the land's culinary character: Cucania in Latin, Cuccagna in Italian, Coquaigne in French, or Cockaigne in English shared their etymological origin in coquina, the Latin for kitchen. Or alternatively, its appellation captured Cockaigne's allure as a place exempt from toil and trouble in the German Schlaraffen- or Schlawraffenland and its English and Dutch equivalents ‘lubberland’ and luilekkerland. Cockaigne was quite literally a land of gluttonous layabouts, in which sleep was rewarded and work punished. Full of food and leisure and free from death or disease, this dreamland evoked an earthly paradise or the Golden Age of Greek mythology; and yet, Cockaigne was regarded with suspicion.One of the earliest written sources, a thirteenth-century poem from the Carmina Burana, already adopted a satirical tone in reference to a Cucanesian abbot holding council with his fellow revellers, and by the sixteenth-century, such moralising was commonplace in accounts of the supposed delights of Cockaigne.