Rewriting Laughter in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This chapter unites sets of historically distant thoughts about laughter and humour, focusing on rhetoricians, doctors and comic writers in France, Italy and England during the sixteenth century. Although sixteenth-century writers of and about humour used classical work as a model for inspiration, their bid to understand the nature and function of laughter took a number of unprecedented directions, many of which anticipate our modern humour theories. This chapter uses the three modern categories of superiority, incongruity and relief as a framework for surveying the early modern intervention to the critical re-assessment of humour, providing a paradigm case study of a history of humour ‘theory’. It considers discussions of poetics, analyses medical writings by physicians and provides a wide range of examples of early modern humour in practice, for instance in drama, poetry and sermons. Bringing out the historical distinctness of sixteenth-century European thinking about laughter, the chapter also unwrites the tendency of current scholarship to group comic thinking from Aristotle to Hobbes under the label of ‘superiority theory’.