The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxv

   PDF

2. Preliminaries: Terms and Theories

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   2. Introduction

      • Daniel Derrin

      Pages 3-18

   3. The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the Limits of Method

      • Conal Condren

      Pages 19-41

   4. No Sense of Humour? ‘Humour’ Words in Old Norse

      • Hannah Burrows

      Pages 43-70

   5. Rewriting Laughter in Early Modern Europe

      • Lucy Rayfield

      Pages 71-91

   6. The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions

      • Rebecca Tierney-Hynes

      Pages 93-108

   7. Bergson’s Theory of the Comic and Its Applicability to Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy

      • Jessica Milner Davis

      Pages 109-132

   8. Comic Character and Counter-Violation: Critiquing Benign Violation Theory

      • Daniel Derrin

      Pages 133-150

   9. Humour and Religion: New Directions?

      • Richard A. Gardner

      Pages 151-172

3. Case Studies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 173-173

      PDF

   2. Visual Humour on Greek Vases (550–350 BC): Three Approaches to the Ambivalence of Ugliness in Popular Culture

      • Alexandre G. Mitchell

      Pages 175-200

   3. Approaching Jokes and Jestbooks in Premodern China

      • Giulia Baccini

      Pages 201-220

   4. Testing the Limits of Pirandello’s Umorismo: A Case Study Based on Xiaolin Guangji

      • Antonio Leggieri

      Pages 221-238

   5. The Monsters That Laugh Back: Humour as a Rhetorical Apophasis in Medieval Monstrology

      • Rafał Borysławski

      Pages 239-256

   6. Medieval Jokes in Serious Contexts: Speaking Humour to Power

      • Martha Bayless

      Pages 257-273

   7. ‘Lightness and Maistrye’: Herod, Humour, and Temptation in Early English Drama

      • Jamie Beckett

      Pages 275-292

   8. Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities

      • Alison Williams

      Pages 293-312

   9. Naïve Parody in Rabelais

      • John Parkin

      Pages 313-324

   10. ‘By God’s Arse’: Genre, Humour and Religion in William Wager’s Moral Interludes

       • Lieke Stelling

       Pages 325-339

This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history. 

• comedy
• laughter
• joke
• satire
• farce
• comic
• jesting

• Department of English Studies, Durham University, Durham, UK

  Daniel Derrin

• Department of History, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

  Hannah Burrows

Daniel Derrin is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. He has held research and teaching fellowships in Australia and the UK and has published widely on early modern literature and on humour.


Hannah Burrows is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has edited and translated the Old Norse riddle corpus for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages series, and her publications include articles on the relationship between the riddles and Norse mythological poetry.

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