While the artistic responses that in fact appear at any time take the specific forms they do from the genre possibilities available in the local context, it is crucial to note that those genres are also always open for revision, expansion and recombination. The genre possibilities in the early modern period, including a revivified pastoral and the newly contrived tragicomedy, were apparently exploited in ways that let us understand the pictures, poems and plays discussed here not only as themselves evidence of past skepticism, but also as ways of satisfying it. The claim that art satisfies is of course a truism. But the assumption here is rather more complex. In other words, embedded in the historical study, I find shards that allow us to understand some human universals about brains and art and knowledge and skepticism.
Bodies have knowledge but never have enough.
A work of art can, now and then, supply just that knowledge needed by minds and bodies. Taken together, they exhibit a variety of ways in which the cultural work of a historical period of deep distress in early modern Europe offered a measure of satisfaction to its audiences. I consider their testimony to be skeptical in that they all suggest or at least surmise the insufficiency or incompleteness of knowledge. Yet they were also satisfying. The tragedies satisfied, as Aristotle knew, by providing a necessary knowledge even if that knowledge confirmed the skeptic's worst fears about the world's malignity.