Comic Tales of the Middle Ages

Three groups of comic narratives composed in Latin in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries are made accessible to both scholar and general reader alike in Mark Wolterbeek's collection and analysis. The volume contains the author's own translations into idiomatic English accompanied by the original Latin texts as well as extensive commentary. This exploration of an area of medieval comedy that has been largely ignored in both classic and recent scholarly works focuses on the...
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Three groups of comic narratives composed in Latin in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries are made accessible to both scholar and general reader alike in Mark Wolterbeek's collection and analysis. The volume contains the author's own translations into idiomatic English accompanied by the original Latin texts as well as extensive commentary. This exploration of an area of medieval comedy that has been largely ignored in both classic and recent scholarly works focuses on the ridicula, nugae, and satyrae, three genres that anticipate the great literary flowering of the High Middle Ages. Wolterbeek contends that the ridicula seem to be the Latin ancestors of the Old French fabliaux and other popular genres of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as the Schwanke novelle and facezie, and that the writers of the nugae pave the way for the learned comic tradition of the twelfth century, notably the comediae elegiacae, which in turn are the forerunners of Renaissance drama. The narrative satires, satyrae, offered here contain penetrating insights into medieval life. These poems and Wolterbeek's accompanying commentary demonstrate not only the evolution of medieval comic literature but also the development of man's notion of the comic during this seminal period in the history of Western civilization.

A chapter is devoted to each of the three genres: the ridicula, funny stories recounted in rhythmic verse that often present tales of human deceit and presumption; the nugae, trifles of scholarly Latin poets writing in metrical verse; and the satyrae, narrative satires that offer penetrating insights into medieval life. An appendix contains the texts and translations of more than a dozen works including seven ridicula from the famous florilegium known as the Cambridge songs and the lengthy Unibos; nugae by Fulcoius of Beauvais as well as Radulfus Tortarius; and two satyrae, Satyrae contra Moriuht by Warnerius of Rouen and De matronis by Peter the Painter. Knowledge of these early comic traditions is of great value to the literary scholar and to the humanist. Comic Tales of the Middle Ages should be part of the collections of major public libraries and large university libraries in the United States and Europe and will be a useful addition to the reading lists for courses in Medieval Latin, Medieval Literature, World Literature, Comparative Literature, and Comic Literature.