1、INTRODUCTIONDontworry,IvegotthekeyGuyHalsallA man is walking down the street when a neighbour runs up to himand says, Hey, yourhouse is on re! Dont worry, replies the man,Ive got the key.Thisjoke,possiblythebestinthiscollectionofessays(certainlythatwhichgot the biggest laugh at the conference where
2、these papers were origi-nally presented), is to be found in John Haldons treatment of Humourand the everyday in Byzantium,and makes a useful focus forthis in-troduction. Identifying the humorous in late antique and early medievalwriting is very often a question of locating the key.That, however, pre
3、supposes the willingness to look for the key in therst place, and this seems to have been conspicuously absent in previousgenerations of scholarship. At several points in the following chapters,we shall encounterfootnotes pointing out how previous researchers haveeithernot noticed that a work was in
4、tended to be funny, orhave re-jected interpretations of late antique or early medieval works which seethem as anything otherthan entirely earnest.Even a genre as overtlyintended to amuse as riddle collections has, in its continental manifes-tations, been neglected.Recently, historians have looked in
5、creasinglyat humourand its uses;the ancient worldand Anglo-Saxon England,WiththepossibleexceptionoftheoccasionwhenMattInnestrippedovertheoverheadprojectorsextension lead.Below, p. .Forexample, below, p. ,n.;p.,n.Bayless, below, p. .See, forexample, HumourandHistory, ed. K. Cameron (Oxford,);ACultura
6、lHistoryofHumour,ed. J. Bremmer and H. Roodenberg (London, ), with bibliography at pp. .In addition to works on Roman humour found in the footnotes of the essays in this collection,see: D. Arnould, LeRireetleslarmesdanslalitteraturegrecquedHomereaPlaton(Paris, );LeRiredesanciens:actesduColloqueInter
7、nationale,UniversitedeRouen,EcoleNormaleSuperieure, janvier ,ed. M. Trede, P. Hoffmann and C. Auvray-Assayas (Paris, ); Laughter Down the Centuries,vol. III, ed. S. Jakel, A. Timonen and V.-M. Rissanen (Turku, ). Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.orgCambridge University Press0521811163 - Humo
8、ur, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle AgesEdited by Guy HalsallExcerptMore information GuyHalsallwith its distinctive corpus of literature,have been well served. The lateantique and early medieval periods in Europe, however, have not yetreceived their share of this attentio
9、n.There are a number of possible reasons for this neglect. One mightsimply be that, as is often said, history is made in the present; in manyways it is also made in the image of the present. Humour, it would seem,has appeared too ippant a subject for a self-consciously serious dis-cipline such as hi
10、story. Over the past years, much early medievalhistoriography has been about reconstructing political history, and thehistory of institutions, lay and ecclesiastical. Humour has seemed irrel-evant to this sort of project. As Matthew Innes says,the study of theCarolingian period reveals this attitude
11、 particularly well. A clever writerlike Notkerof St-Gall Notkerthe Stammerer who used humourtomake very serious points, suffered the fate of prolonged exclusion fromthe canon of respectable sources. Though the great academic schol-ars of past generations may seem easy targets as humourless tweed-cla
12、dold fogies (perhaps unfairly; for all I know, Georg-Heinrich Pertz andGeorg Waitz may have had a great laugh in their spare time in the of-ces of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, though it does seem slightlyunlikely), it must be stressed that attitudes have been slow to change.More recent histori
13、cal projects, the history of gender most notably, havebeen equally if not more self-consciously humourless; the recovery of therole of women and of gender relations in the past were, and are, not inthemselves laughing matters, and that also appears to have informed thenature of historical writing. T
14、hus Ross Balzarettipoints out that, evenwith recent attention to past laughter, humour and gender has remaineda neglected topic oddly, as humouris in many ways a particularlygendered aspect of social practice.There may therefore be something in the idea that for humour in lateantique and early medie
15、val Europe to become a topic, it had to waitfor the emergence of a generation of historians who not only saw thathistory has its funny side but also, conversely, that humour and its pastuses are, themselves, serious subjects. Maybe early medieval humourSee, recently, Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature
16、, ed. J. Wilcox (Cambridge, ) and referencestherein.Below, p. .D. Knowles, GreatHistoricalEnterprises:ProblemsinMonasticHistory (London, ), pp. ,fora brief but very useful history of the Monumenta.Balzaretti, below, p. .Thus, note that it is a man who is warned of his house burning down, just as tha
17、t tiresome trio,forever going into a pub, are an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman. Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.orgCambridge University Press0521811163 - Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle AgesEdited by Guy HalsallExcerptMore informationIntroduction
18、 had to wait for a generation of historians with a sense of humour. Thisgeneration also sees that very serious points can be made through satire,irony and ridicule. To say that a passage in the sources is satirical orironic is not to denude it of serious content. To study late antique andmedieval te
19、xts to nd instances of humouris not to belittle them ortomiss the point by looking at peripheral ephemera. It is also possible thatthe search for humour in past texts, which, as we shall see, are rarelyobvious places to look forjokes, mirrors broaderchanges in the natureof comedy overrecent decades,
20、 which have often, in the world of post-modernism, focussed on conscious, self-referential irony.Be that as it may, a more obvious reason for the neglect of late antiqueand early medieval humour lies in the unpromising nature of the sourcematerial. Danuta Shanzer outlines the fate of classical humou
21、r in herpaper.The obvious comedic genres of the ancient world, and theirrich traditions, seem to have withered in late antiquity. This presentssomethingofacontrastwithhumourintheeasternhalfoftheoldRomanEmpire, that which became Byzantine. John Haldon demonstrates amuch clearer continuation of overtl
22、y humorous genres there.At rstsight it seems as though we can contribute to the ongoing debate onthe Pirenne thesisby adding to Pirennes list of gold, spices, silk andpapyrusanothercommoditywhichtheArabconquestspreventedfromreaching the west: jokes.But, as with so much of the Pirenne debate,there is
23、 more to it than that. The great comic genres of antiquity appearto have atrophied long before the Fall of the West. Even the last westernsatirical play of the classical tradition, the fth-century Querolus, can becondemned as not particularly amusing(although that, of course, mayjust be because we d
24、ont get the joke any more) and the genre of satireseems to have disappeared earlier still. There was continuity, too, thoughcontinuity from the specically late Roman situation. Shanzer points outthe continuation of late antique humorous techniques such as the use ofbons mots and grim irony in narrat
25、ive histories. The fate of this strategyin the works of fth- and sixth-century writers, and the way in which itBelow, pp. .Below, pp. .See, recently,TheSixthCentury:Production,DistributionandDemand, ed. R. Hodges and W. Bowden(Leiden, ); TheLongEighthCentury, ed. I. L. Hansen and C. J. Wickham (Leid
26、en, ).Honesty demands that I credit Paul Kershaw as originator of this joke, though he may yet notthank me forthis acknowledgement!Shanzer, below, p.Forsome discussion of what the joke may actually have been about, see R. Van Dam, LeadershipandCommunityinLateAntiqueGaul(Berkeley,),pp.,and J.F.Drinkw
27、ater,TheBacaudaeof fth-century Gaul, in Fifth-centuryGaul:ACrisisofIdentity? ed. J. F. Drinkwater and H. Elton(Cambridge, ), pp. . Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.orgCambridge University Press0521811163 - Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle AgesEdited by Guy
28、HalsallExcerptMore information GuyHalsallwas employed to respond to the changing world of those centuries, arefurther explored in my own chapter.Riddles, a particularly commonearly medieval form of learned humorous expression, also derive theirinspiration from a late Latin writer, Symphosius.That ap
29、art, we are usually forced to seek humour in non-humoroustypes of writing, and this can be problematic, as shall become clear.Nevertheless, some early medieval historical writers have long been sus-pected of deliberate humour. Gregory of Tours is one such.In the in-troductiontohisPenguintranslationo
30、fGregorysHistories,LewisThorpeincluded a section entitled Humourand irony.Thorpe, as often inhis translation, seems to have correctly identied an aspect of Gregorysstyle,though his insight did not spawn much further discussion of thebishops sense of humouruntil, in a seminal chapterof his Narrators
31、ofBarbarian History, Walter Goffart argued that Gregory was a satirist.This has not convinced everyone, and Shanzer criticises the thesis be-low, pointing out that Goffarts model of how Gregory would have ac-quired models for satirical history is too conjectural.The satura ormishmash of the Historie
32、s organisation may result in them appearing tohave the characteristics of satire disjointed elements resembling a mod-ern comedy sketch-show but this structure seems to result from quiteotherdemands. Gregorys view of causation, ratherthan, as in manymodern views, being horizontal, with history unfol
33、ding as the cumula-tive result of previous human interactions, was typological and vertical.That is to say, if people committed particular acts in particular waysorcircumstances then a particularconsequence, of divine provenance,would descend upon them. This, obviously, is the reasoning behind thena
34、rrative structuring of miracle collections and many saints lives, es-pecially Gregorys, into small self-contained incidents with actions anddivinelyordainedrewardorpunishment.TheHistoriesfallintodisjointedBelow, pp. .Bayless, below, p. .The absence of a chapteron Gregorys humouris perhaps a glaring
35、lacuna in this volume.However, Gregorys humour has already been discussed. Simon Loseby is apparently workingon a study of Gregorys jokes, and I shall make a number of comments about Gregory in thisintroduction. The forthcoming collaborative work, TheWorldofGregoryofTours, ed. K. Mitchelland I. N. W
36、ood (Leiden, ) will doubtless also address the Goffart thesis and related aspectsof Gregorys style.GregoryofTours: TheHistoryoftheFranks, trans. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, ), pp. .Thorpes translation often captures the sense of Gregorys Latin, although often at the expenseof mangling its technical me
37、aning.W. Goffart, TheNarratorsofBarbarianHistory, AD : Jordanes,GregoryofTours,Bede.PaultheDeacon (Princeton, ), pp. .Below, p. ; see also, forexample, the riposte by R. Van Dam, Saints and their Miracles in LateAntiqueGaul (Princeton, ), p. , which makes a similarpoint. Cambridge University Press w
38、ww.cambridge.orgCambridge University Press0521811163 - Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle AgesEdited by Guy HalsallExcerptMore informationIntroduction independent episodes not as a result of Gregorys desire to write satirebut because they are written to the same patt
39、ern as his hagiography.Recent analyses, notably Goffarts, have accustomed us to the injunc-tion to read all of Gregorys works, Historiae and Miracula,aspartofaunied and coherent project. Thus the self-contained stories of seculargoings-onareinmanywaysbestunderstoodasasortofanti-hagiography.Instead o
40、f immediate miraculous healing or cure, or chastisement of en-emies, demonstrating the eternal power or merit of the godly, to striveafterworldly rewards in these episodes produces at best only transientbenet, but more often no good at all usually quite the reverse.Nevertheless, to say that the Hist
41、ories were not written as satire doesnot imply that they were written without deliberate humour, or evenwithout elements of satire orparody. Laughteris very commonly the re-sponse of modern audiences to Gregorys tales, and it is often hard to seethat this humour is not deliberate. By juxtaposing the
42、 eternal merit andeverlasting rewards of the saintly with the pointless doings of the worldly,Gregory seems clearly to have intended to ridicule the latter, especiallywhen the deaths and otherpunishments of wrongdoers often contain el-ements of farce.This sort of humour could be and was used effecti
43、velyin didactic and homily in east and west. John Haldon draws our atten-tion to Anastasius of Sinai, who used humour to ridicule his parishionersand alert them to the folly of their ways.It is possible, if perhaps notprobable, that ridicule is also used to similar effect in Salvians On theGovernanc
44、eofGod;Saint Jerome was an adept at this technique. It mayseem odd to look forhumourin hagiography but, as Shanzerpoints outand as we shall see below, it is to be found there in plenty.Laughter,asRossBalzarettisays,isalsothecommonmodernresponseto the stories of Liutprand of Cremona, whose English tr
45、anslator like-wise appreciated the sense of the original.Liutprands humour is lesscontroversial than Gregorys in that he very often cues it with a com-ment which makes clearthat he regards the succeeding tale as funny.Nevertheless, his humour has long awaited a sophisticated discussion,especially in
46、 regard to the ways in which it is used to reinforce ideasabout gender. A third author whose overt use of humour has been notedis Notker. As mentioned, Notkers jokes long earned him a form of schol-arly damnation, but they have also, in the end, meant that he is one ofGregory seemingly never tired o
47、f informing his readers of the heresiarch Arius death on thetoilet; see also Shanzer, below, p. ,n. Forotherepisodes with clearfarcical elements seeHistories ., MGHSRM ., ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison (Hanover, ).Haldon, below, pp. .Halsall, below, p. .Balzaretti, below, p. and n. .Balzaretti, below,
48、 pp. . Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.orgCambridge University Press0521811163 - Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle AgesEdited by Guy HalsallExcerptMore information GuyHalsallthe few early medieval historical writers to have had serious attentiondevoted to his use of humour.The inuence of David Ganzs seminal study of Notkeris evident in several chapters of this book. MatthewInnes and Paul Kershaw develop, in slightly different ways, our under-standing
