Laughter and Narrative in the Later Middle Ages

German Comic Tales C.1350-1525

Sebastian Coxon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351560825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachen

In contrast to the vernacular literary traditions of France, Italy and England, comic tales in verse flourished in late medieval Germany, providing bawdy entertainment for larger audiences of public recitals as well as for smaller numbers of individual readers. In a sustained close analysis Sebastian Coxon explores both the narrative design and fundamental thematic preoccupations of these short texts. A distinctively performative tradition of pre-modern narrative literature emerges which invited its recipients to think, learn and above all to laugh in a number of different ways.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Laughter and Narrative

For a book on late medieval comic narrative to extend the scope of its analysis to include the phenomenon of laughter itself, is on the face of it rather typical of a broader trend within current medieval studies. Under the influence of historical anthropology, not to mention the reinvigorated methodological programme of cultural studies ('Kulturwissenschaft'), literary historians have come to ask more insistently than before just what their chosen texts may reveal, in their own distinctively literary way, about the fundamentals of human experience and behaviour, and about the rules and collective patterns governing these as subject to slow and erratic processes of change over the 'long duration'.¹ As the epigrammatic comments of philosophers, poets and scientists from antiquity to the early modern period would suggest, there is no more central anthropological theme than laughter. However, the emphasis placed on laughter in this study is due no less to a recognition of the dynamic character of much medieval literature, and of vernacular comic literature in particular, which was designed to exert a powerful communicative force on its recipients.² Faint echoes of audience laughter may still be detected in the prediction and description of this archetypal response within the literary texts themselves; and these traces, together with the narrative strategies and thematic biases of such texts, indicate that the comic literature of this period was predicated upon the very real social and emotional involvement of its listeners and readers.

The primary material in question, that is to say, short comic tales or 'Schwankmären', belongs to a broader European tradition of often bawdy storytelling — encompassing Old French fabliaux and Boccaccio's Decameron, for instance — which draws in part on a common stock of motifs and narrative structures. Against this background the German tradition is distinctive and worthy of further investigation for two main reasons. First, in the German context the form of the secular short narrative only comes to be dominated by comic functionality in the later Middle Ages, from around the second half of the fourteenth century until the first decades of the sixteenth century. Second, the longevity of this type of comic literature is all the more remarkable on account of its composition in verse couplets during a period when other analogous traditions had long since adopted prose. This suggests that even as late as the end of the fifteenth century the primary modes of reception of these German tales were aural (public recital or performance to larger audiences; shared reading aloud in smaller groups).³ As both texts (literary constructs executing narrative strategies and containing a range of poetic devices) and, to varying degrees, social 'events', 'Schwankmären' constitute a pre-eminent field of enquiry for exploring the interdependence of laughter and narrative in the past. Consequently, this study sets out to establish both what these texts can tell us about cultures of laughter in the later (German) Middle Ages, and, in turn, the extent to which the functionality, narrative design and thematic preoccupations of these texts may be illuminated by the goal of laughter as a recipient response. Just as there can be little doubt as to literature's capacity actively to construct a secondary anthropological system or culture in its own right and not just to reflect or represent an external reality,⁴ so we should not forget that the collective and social practices of literary reception in the later Middle Ages were perhaps not always so readily divorced from other kinds of institutionalized and ritualized behaviour. In practice, short comic narratives and their complement of recipient laughter may well have bridged what is now regarded in theory as the strict divide between literature and real life.

Historical Laughter

First steps towards reconstructing laughter in the historical past may be taken by surveying the history of its evaluation and conceptualization, as well records of any actual instances or practices of laughter. In respect of the Middle Ages it soon becomes clear that laughter is often noted or described in conjunction with certain emotions and attitudes towards the world at large, or with certain forms of social interaction such as joking, entertainment or mockery. Most fundamentally, the very physicality of laughter meant that its perception was often dictated by attitudes towards the human body per se.⁵ Paradigmatic for this is the position of extreme hostility towards laughter that was adopted in much monastic writing of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and elaborated upon in the centuries that followed.⁶ Just as this world was utterly inferior to the kingdom of heaven, so man's physical body was to be denied in favour of his soul; thus, to any true judge of humanity, man's ability to joke and laugh belonged to the lower part of his nature, and the practical implications of this damning verdict (of Augustine's)⁷ came to be enshrined in various Rules. In the most influential of these, the Regula Sancti Benedicti (compiled c. 530—60), monks are repeatedly warned of the sins of the mouth or tongue, including the love of 'risum multum aut excussum' (4.54 [immoderate or boisterous laughter]),⁸ and being slow to laugh belongs to Benedict's official scale of humility.⁹ In the Concordia regularum of Benedict of Aniane (c. 750—821), St Benedict's admonition is supported by quotations from three further Rules (Regula Sancti Basilii, Regula Sancti Ferreoli Episcopi, Regula Sancti Cassiani).¹⁰ Of the many others contained in Benedict of Aniane's Codex regularum, at least one extends the topical arguments to reveal more social concerns: 'Propterea cavenda est omnibus nobis joci et risus immoderata luxuria, per quam plerumque amarissima inter fratres nascuntur scandala' (Regula Pauli et Stephani cap. 37 [957] [Moreover we should all avoid the excessive luxury of joking and laughter, through which the bitterest controversies often arise among the brothers]).

The ultimate textual authority for this position was of course scriptural: on the one hand, the Old Testament's numerous memorable proverbial expressions contrasting the loud and empty laughter of the wicked and foolish with the radiant (and silent) joy of the wise and the blessed;¹¹ on the other, the figure of the weeping Christ of the New Testament, himself subjected to the derision of disbelievers,¹² and the promises made to the poor and downtrodden that their tears on earth will be transformed into laughter in heaven.¹³ Medieval biblical exegesis further consolidated these ideas. For Gregory the Great (c. 540—604) the two laughters in question were that of the (corrupt) body as opposed to that of the heart,¹⁴ and there arose a tradition of finding each of these embodied in the respective responses of Sarah and Abraham, who both laugh, albeit in quite different ways, at the miraculous news of their forthcoming child (consequently named Isaac or 'Laughter').¹⁵ Christ's tears were obviously exemplary beyond compare, as argued most passionately perhaps by the Eastern Church Father, John Chrysostom (d. 407),¹⁶ and as reiterated time and again in the (monastic) West, leading not infrequently to veritable eulogies of lacrimosity.¹⁷ The power of this denigrating view of laughter continued to make itself felt much later in the Middle Ages whenever the theological debate turned to humility and pride. Most excoriating of all in this context is Bernard of Clairvaux's caricature of the vain monk who guffaws involuntarily and is nothing more than a 'vesica collecto turgida vento' [inflated windbag].¹⁸

Even within the ascetic Christian tradition, however, the rejection of laughter did not go entirely unqualified. ¹⁹ For a number of the early Church Fathers, in both East and West, man's ability to joke and laugh was not to be denied entirely, but rather to be held in check: man may be an animal who can laugh, argued Clement of Alexandria (c. 150—215), but he should no more laugh at everything than a horse should always be neighing.²⁰ Others, including Ambrose (d. 397) and Chrysostom, expressly repudiated laughter and joking for monks alone, or when in church.²¹ Loud laughter ('cachinnus') was certainly never deemed acceptable in a religious context,²² and distorted leering faces in fits of convulsive laughter became a standard iconographic motif in the visual representation of devils and fools.²³ Nevertheless, greater tolerance towards 'civilized' jokes and self-disciplined mirth among monks was guardedly voiced in the course of the Middle Ages as well, as signalled by the concession Abbot Smaragdus (d. 843) makes in his Expositio in Regulam S. Benedicti,²⁴ and confirmed at the latest by Hugh of St Victor's admonition to novices to show temperance in all aspects of their (physical) bearing such as 'ridere sine apertione dentium' (De institutione novitiarum cap. 12 [943B] [laughter without baring teeth]). The Church's stance was almost inevitably more equivocal in regard to the secular clergy, who were in constant contact with the laity. Thus, jokes and laughter were sanctioned in certain forms (from parodic sermons to robust horseplay and 'carnivalesque rites') at certain officially recognized festive times (such as around Christmas).²⁵ Similarly, Easter joy was made palpable for congregations who, scholars now think, were encouraged to laugh — in church(!) — at the earthy jokes and comic performances of their priests.²⁶ That the inclusion of entertaining material in sermons had even become routine in some quarters is indicated by the controversy surrounding this issue throughout the high and later Middle Ages.²⁷

The significance of laughter and joking in the upper echelons of lay society was the subject of another body of writing in Latin, penned at first in the early Middle Ages by churchmen, often of high ecclesiastical office, and subsequently, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by increasing numbers of clerics and scholars. The Formula vitae honestae by bishop Martin of Braga (d. 579) is a good example of the former, with its precepts for laymen being organized around four cardinal virtues ('prudentia'; 'fortitudo'; 'temperantia'; 'iustitia') and its discussion of laughter coming under the rubric of temperance: 'Sales tui sine dente sint, ioci sine vilitate, risus sine cachinno' (4, 32—33, [May your quips be without teeth, your jokes without baseness, and your laughter not uproarious]). These sentiments are repeated almost word for word five centuries later in bishop Hildebert's Libellus de quattuor virtutibus vitae honestae.²⁸ Evidently such qualifications of laughter form part of a social ethics that again places the utmost emphasis on bodily discipline, whilst this time accepting the need for entertainment, joviality and hilarity, providing these are not detrimental to personal and collective honour.²⁹ Treatises like these document the rise of courtly culture in the West,³⁰ whose codification and literary formulation was to a large extent dependent upon clerical authors and which thus received decisive impulses both from Christian doctrine as well as the authorities of classical and late antiquity. In the second half of the thirteenth century Thomas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Laughter and Narrative
• PART I: LAUGHTER
• PART II: NARRATIVE DESIGN
• PART III: THEMATIC CONTENT
• Bibliography
• Index