‘In the Manner of the Ancient Jewish Historians’: Parody and Satire, Panegyric and Censure in Eighteenth-Century Mock Chronicles

Abstract

In mid-eighteenth-century Europe, anonymous authors produced parodic satires masquerading as earnest exemplars of the chronicle form. Couched in an antiquated, quasi-biblical register, these mock chronicles drew flimsily fictional portraits of modern life. Their debt to the historical chronicle lent them an authority which legitimized their subversion of the political systems under which they appeared, yet the ambiguity of their existence as ‘parodies’ enabled their use, in the hands of others, for the purposes of panegyric. The very existence of this ephemeral genre, long overlooked, testifies to the chronicle's enduring cultural valence and highlights the exchange of literary forms across borders, languages, and cultures that took place in the eighteenth century.