Between learned and popular culture: A world of syncretism and acculturation

Abstract

The world of charlatans is a world of constantly shifting borders and redefinitions, a world of crossed lines and pushed boundaries. Can one even speak of “the world” of charlatans in the singular, when the examples we are given to read in this volume reveal such great diversity that they seem to defeat any attempt to define common traits, as Roy Porter (1989) tried to do in his time? Certainly, commercial interests and the lure of a quick and easy profit seem to have motivated some charlatans. Certainly, the universal effects of the nostrum or (psycho)therapeutic procedures were often put forward as a commercial argument. Certainly, many had an itinerant career; but this was not always the case. In fact, these traits are not shared, and the main reason is probably that, aside from a very particular context in early modern Italy, the qualification of charlatan was not claimed by the actors themselves, but was attributed to them by others, be they contemporaries or later historians. These features are therefore only common if we understand them as stigmata1 attributed to charlatans by those who wish to distinguish themselves from them or to draw a line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.