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Despite popular opinions of the 'dark Middle Ages' and a 'gloomy early modern age', many people laughed, smiled, giggled, chuckled, enternained and rediculed each other. This volume demonstrates how important laughter had been at times and how diverse the situations proved to be in which people laughed. The contributions examine a wide gamut of significant cases of laughter in literary texts, historical documents, and art works. Laughter reflected a variety of concerns, interests, and intentions, and the collective approach in this volume to laughter in the past opens many new windows to the history of mentality, social and religious conditions, gender relationships, and power structures Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections. Also an introduction / Albrecht Classen -- Laughter in Procopius's Wars / Judith Hagen -- "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology / Livnat Holtzman -- Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation / Daniel F. Pigg -- The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies / Mark Burde -- Women's laughter and gender politics in medieval conduct discourse / Olga V. Trokhimenko -- Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône / Madelon Köhler-Busch -- Laughter and the comic in a religious text: example of the Cantigas de Santa Maria / Connie L. Scarborough -- The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus / John Sewell -- Laughing at the beast: the Judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period / Birgit Wiedl -- Yes ... but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio / Fabian Alfie -- Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry: the ethics of humor in Rustico Filippi's invectives / Nicolino Applauso -- Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland / Feargal Ó Béarra -- Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales / Jean E. Jost -- Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde / Gretchen Mieszkowski -- Laughing and eating in the fabliaux / Sarah Gordon -- Laughter and medieval stalls / Christine Bousquet-Labouérie -- Vox populi e voce professionis: Processus juris joco-serius. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter / Scott L. Taylor -- "So I thought as I stood, to mirth us among": the function of laughter in The second shepherds' play / Jean N. Goodrich -- Laughing in late-medieval verse (mæren) and prose (Schwänke) narratives: epistemological strategies and hermeneutic explorations / Albrecht Classen -- The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs / Rosa Alvarez Perez -- Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor / Elizabeth Chesney Zegura -- You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie / Lia B. Ross -- Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit (1592) / Kyle Diroberto -- The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art / Martha Moffitt Peacock -- The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor / Jessica Tvordi -- Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) / Robert J. Alexander -- Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in the Chymische hochzeit / Thomas Willard -- The comic power of illusion-allusion: laughter, La devineresse, and the scandal of a glorious century / Diane Rudall -- Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century / Allison P. Coudert.
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