The end of conduct

by Barbara Correll

Grobianus et Grobiana, a little known but key Renaissance text, is the starting point for this examination of indecency, conduct, and subject formation in the early modern period. First published in 1549, Friedrich Dedekind's ironic poem recommends the most disgusting behavior - indecency - as a means of instilling decency. The poem, Barbara Correll maintains, not only supplements prior conduct literature but offers a reading of it as well; her analysis of the Grobianus texts (the neo-Latin original, the German vernacular adaptation, the 1605 English translation, and Thomas Dekker's Guls Horne book) also provides a historical account of conduct during the shift from a medieval to a Renaissance sensibility.