No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Laughing with Sacred Things, ca. 1100–1350: A History in Four Objects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2021
Abstract
Exploring the range of circumstances in which medieval Christians laughed with, against, at, and through religious topics, this article investigates four objects: an ivory cross, an ampulla of a saint's blood, a preaching codex, and a pilgrim's badge. While these objects are taken to illustrate a diversity of attitudes to religious humor, they are also, in light of recent work citing the productive power of medieval matter, scrutinized as agents in their own right. The article suggests two significant patterns. On the one hand, the objects point to laughter's use as a unique mode of spiritual practice. Through amusing miracles, through the provocative work of comic sermons, and through the playful humor of pilgrimage badges, Christians from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries were able to use humor to relate to their faith in sophisticated and often counterintuitive ways. Yet as the four objects and their use also attest, these modes of comic relation were also subjected to clerical reduction and regulation. Harnessing the pedagogical potential of laughter especially, preachers, hagiographers, and clerics all worked to redirect more anarchic forms of religious humor toward functional ends. While tracing how laughter with Christian topics was increasingly encouraged, the article suggests that the price of this encouragement was that laughter was often brought into a more policed domain of orthodox Christian practice.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History
Footnotes
This paper was originally developed as part of the Material Relations team at SAS Tyumen, and I am grateful for the advice of the team members (notably Zach Reyna, Evgeny Grishin, John Tangney, and duskin drum). A version was presented at the inaugural meeting of the Medieval History Society at University College London, and I would like to thank the members for their kind feedback and suggestions. I am also thankful for the help of Wilma Jones, Evelyn Knox-Vydmanov, and Clifford Ostfeld for their advice on early drafts of the paper.
References
1 Dubin, Nathaniel E., ed. and trans., The Fabliaux: A New Verse Translation (New York: Liveright, 2013)Google Scholar.
2 For discussion of the comic elements of these stories, see Cooke, Thomas D. and Honeycutt, Benjamin L., eds., The Humour of the Fabliaux (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Levy, Brian J., The Comic Text: Patterns and Images in the Old French Fabliaux (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 239–252Google Scholar.
3 Suchomski, Joachim, “Delectatio” und “Utilitas”: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis mittelalterlicher komischer Literatur (Munich: Francke, 1975)Google Scholar; Verdon, Jean, Rire au Moyen Age (Paris: Perrin, 2001)Google Scholar; and Goff, Jacques Le, “Laughter in the Middle Ages,” in A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Bremmer, Jan and Roodenburg, Herman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 40–53Google Scholar, originally published as Le Goff, Jacques, “Rire au Moyen Age,” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 3 (1989): 1–19Google Scholar.
4 Camille, Michael, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992)Google Scholar.
5 Bayless, Martha, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burde, Mark, “The Parodia sacra Problem and Medieval Comic Studies,” in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, its Meaning, and Consequences, ed. Classen, Albrecht (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 215–242CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages, 208–210.
7 Olga V. Trokhimenko, Constructing Virtue and Vice: Femininity and Laughter in Courtly Society (ca. 1150–1300) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2014). For continuing discomfort about laughter, see also Jones, Peter J. A., “Preaching Laughter in the Thirteenth Century: The Exempla of Arnold of Liège (d. ca. 1308) and his Dominican milieu,” Journal of Medieval History 41, no. 2 (2015): 169–183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” Exemplaria 22, no. 2 (2010): 99–118.
9 Bynum, Caroline Walker, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011)Google Scholar.
10 Ittai Weinryb, “Living Matter: Materiality, Maker, and Ornament in the Middle Ages,” Gesta 52, no. 2 (2013): 113–132. See also Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London: Laurence King, 1998).
11 Elina Gertsman, “Matter Matters,” in Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, ed. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 27–42, at 29.
12 Thomas P. F. Hoving, “The Bury St Edmunds Cross,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 22, no. 10 (June 1964): 317–340.
13 This view was advanced in Hoving's article but was later furthered in Elizabeth C. Parker and C. T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 109–206.
14 For further details of the cross and its illustrations, see Parker, Elizabeth C., “Editing the ‘Cloisters Cross,’” Gesta, 45, no. 2 (2006): 147–160CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Parker and Little, The Cloisters Cross, 242: “Cham ridet dum nuda videt pudibunda parentis / Iudei risere dei penam mor[ientis].” All translations in this article are my own unless otherwise indicated.
16 Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 72. This rhyming couplet can also be found in Gerald of Wales's Speculum Duorum. Attacking a nephew for joking too much and too frivolously, Gerald quoted the little rhyme as a way of warning him that people who mocked sacred things were on the side of evil. Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, or A Mirror of Two Men, ed. Yves Lefèvre and R. B. C. Huygens, trans. Brian Dawson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974), 32–33.
17 Paul H. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), chap. 4, esp. pp. 86–88, 332.
18 See Valerie I. J. Flint, “Honorius Augustoduensis: Imago mundi,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 49, (1982): 7–153, esp. 125 (3.1); and cited in Freedman, Images, 99, 337.
19 On this inscription, see Parker and Little, The Cloisters Cross, 169–171.
20 For instance, Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria, vol. 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), 697: “Tempus flendi nunc est. In futuro ridendi, beati flentes quam ipsi ridebunt.”
21 Bernard of Clairvaux, De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series Latina, 221 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1844–1864) (hereafter cited as PL), 182:964B–965A.
22 Hildebert of Lavardin, Sermones, in PL 171:701B–C.
23 Richard Morris, ed. and trans., Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century (London: Early English Text Society, 1873), xxix, 174.
24 For further discussion, see Peter J. A. Jones, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), chap. 2.
25 Guibert of Nogent, Monodiae, in PL 156:886C–D.
26 Anselm of Canterbury, Opera Omnia, ed. Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Bad Cannstatt, 1984), 101 (letter 2, “Principe suo irridente”).
27 William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum: The History of the English Bishops, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 2:116–119 (chap. 48). See also Charles Warren Hollister, “The Strange Death of William Rufus,” Speculum 48, no. 4 (October 1973): 637–653.
28 William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 333, 572–575.
29 Thomas Hoving, “Super Art Gems of New York City: The Grand and Glorious ‘Hot Pot’—Will Italy Snag It?,” Artnet (website), June 29, 2001, http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/FEATURES/hoving/hoving6-29-01.asp; and cited in Parker, “Editing the ‘Cloisters Cross,’” 150.
30 On similar stereotypes in medieval artworks, see Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), esp. 28–39 on pointed hats and beards.
31 Parker and Little, The Cloisters Cross, 241: “Terra tremit mors victa gemit surgente sepulto / Vita cluit synagoga ruit molimine stult[o].”
32 Rachel Koopmans, “‘Water Mixed with the Blood of Thomas’: Contact Relic Manufacture Pictured in Canterbury Cathedral's Stained Glass,” Journal of Medieval History 42, no. 5 (2016): 535–558, 539–542.
33 Benedict of Peterborough, Passio S. Thomae Cantuariensis, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. James Craigie Robertson and J. B. Sheppard, vol. 2 (London: Rolls Series, 1876), 16.
34 On the item, see Jennifer M. Lee, “Searching for Signs: Pilgrims Identity and Experience Made Visible in the Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 473–491. See also Amy Jeffs, “One Object: Pilgrim Souvenir, Ampulla of Thomas Becket,” British Art Studies 6 (2017) (online journal), accessed July 2019, http://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-6/ampulla-souvenir.
35 Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. and trans. James Craigie Robertson and J. B. Sheppard, vol. 2 (London: Rolls Series, 1876), 96 (2.50).
36 Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula, 73 (2.22).
37 Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin, 2002).
38 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin), 1.6.
39 Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Éditions Alcan, 1924).
40 For similar miracles in the late twelfth-century works of Gerald of Wales, see Giraldus Cambrensis, Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner, vol. 5, Topographia Hibernica (London: Rolls Series, 1867), 128–129 (2:44); and Giraldus Cambrensis, Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner, vol. 6, Iterarium Kambriae (London: Rolls Series, 1868), 17–18 (1.1).
41 Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula, 133–134 (3.21).
42 On this issue, see Jones, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century, chap. 1–2.
43 Aelred of Rievaulx, Vita S. Edwardii Regis et Confessoris, in PL 195:748C–749D: “Haec sunt quae Christo revelante cognovi, et vidi et risi et gavisus sum. Risum enim mihi fecit Dominus, et quicunque audierit corridebit mihi.” On Sarah's laughter, see Catherine Conybeare, The Laughter of Sarah: Biblical Exegesis, Feminist Theory, and the Concept of Delight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
44 Nigel Wireker, The Passion of Saint Lawrence: Epigrams and Marginal Poems, ed. and trans. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1994). An example of this laughter appears on 104–105.
45 John of Ford, Super extremum partem Cantici Canticorum sermones CXX, ed. Edmond Mikkers and Hilary Costello, vol. 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970), 720: “Quid enim aemulatione illa durius aut vehementius excogitari potuit, quae suos ausa est ridere carnifices, longaque examination excocta ad solidum iam ignes non timuit, quoniam ut testa exaruit?” This translation is from John of Ford, Sermons on the Final Verses of the Song of Songs, trans. Wendy Mary Beckett, vol. 7 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 72–73.
46 William of Trahinac, Tractatus quales sunt, in PL 207:1044A–1045A.
47 Horace, Satires, ed. and trans. François Villeneuve (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), 1.1.24: “quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? Ut pueris olim dant crustula blandi doctores, elementa velint ut discere prima.”
48 Bernard of Clairvaux, Super Cantica Canticorum, Sermo 85, in Bernhard von Clairvaux: Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Winkler, vol. 6 (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1994), 642 (85.11).
49 Geoffrey of Clairvaux, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, ed. Ferruccio Gastadelli, vol. 1 (Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1974), cxxxvii: “Quid enim rectius quam risus dicitur contemplationis excessus, cum interim gaudii plenitudo animam raptam supra se non dissolvit inaniter, sed spiritaliter liquefacit? Ceterum huiusmodi risus sicut humana non efficitur industria sed visitatione divina, sic non discitur eruditione sed unctione magistra.”
50 Clemence of Barking, The Life of St. Catherine, ed. William MacBain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964). For Catherine's laughter, see pp. 20–21, lines 633–638: “Mult sunt de grant desmesurance / E de orgoilluse cuintenance. / Entr'els ert grant la risee / E la pulcele unt mult gabee. / Mult se curuce li tyrant / Que li estrif demure tant.”
51 See Concilium Lateranense IV: Canon 9, in Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generalium Decreta: Editio Critica, 2:1: The General Councils of Latin Christendom: From Constaninople IV to Pavia-Siena (869–1424), ed. A. García y García et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 172.
52 For more on this, see Peter J. A. Jones, “Humour at the Fourth Lateran Council,” in Literary Echoes of the Fourth Lateran Council, ed. Maureen Boulton (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 2019), 133–155.
53 Jacques de Vitry, Sermones Vulgares, in The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. T. F. Crane (Publications of the Folk-lore Society 26, 1890), 22 (sermon 56).
54 Jacques de Vitry, Sermones, 94 (sermon 227).
55 On the popularity and spread of the fabliaux, see Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1973), 20–51. For another view, see R. Howard Bloch, The Scandal of the Fabliaux (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1–21.
56 Dubin, The Fabliaux, 466–477.
57 Dubin, The Fabliaux, 885–894.
58 Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli, Sociorum S. Francisci: The writings of Leo, Rufino and Angelo, companions of St. Francis, ed. and trans. Rosalind B. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), chap. 83, p. 234–235. The manure episode can be found in The Assisi Compilation: ‘Compilatio Assisiensis’ dagli Scritti di fr. Leone e Compagni su S. Francesco d'Assisi. Dal M. 1046 di Perugia. Il edizione integrale revduta e correta con versione taliana a fronte e variazioni, ed. Marino Bigaroni (Assisi: Pubblicazioni della Biblioteca Franciscana Chiesa Nuova, 1992), chap. 27, p. 66–68.
59 Jordan of Giano, Chronica, in Johannes Schlageter, “Die Chronica des Bruders Jordan von Giano: Einführung und Kritische Edition nach den Bisher Bekannten Handschriften,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 104 (2011): 33–63, at 33–35, 46, 57–58.
60 For episodes like this involving Brother Juniper, see Chronica XXIV generalium Ordinis minorum, Analecta Franciscana ad Historiam Fratrum Minorum Spectantia, ed. Collegium S. Bonaventurae, vol. 3 (Florence: Quaracchi, 1897), 61. I have discussed this aspect of Franciscan humor further in Peter J. A. Jones, “Humility and Humiliation: The Transformation of Franciscan Humour, c. 1210–1310,” Cultural and Social History, 15:2 (April 2018): 155–175.
61 For a discussion of how thirteenth-century preachers adapted fabliaux tales, see Jeannine Horowitz and Sophia Menache, L'Humour en chaire: Le Rire dans l'Eglise médiévale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1994), esp. 185.
62 For example, Jacques de Vitry, Sermones, 99 (sermon 237).
63 Jacques de Vitry, Sermones, xlii–xliii: “Qui tamen ne nimio merore confundantur, vel nimia fatigatione torpere incipient, aliquando sunt quibusdam jocundis exemplis recreandi et expedit quod eis proponatur fabulosa, ut postmodum evigilent ad audiendum seria et utilia verba. . . . Scurrilia tamen aut obscena verba vel turpis sermo ex ore predicatoris non procedant.”
64 On Thomas's more positive approach to laughter, see Jones, “Preaching Laughter in the Thirteenth Century,” 180–181.
65 Thomæ Cantipratani, Bonum universale de apibus, ed. George Colvener (Duaci: Ex typographia B. Belleri, 1627), 201 (2.13.5): “Reprehensibilis risus est, si immoderatus, si pueriliter effuses, si muliebriter, inutiliterque effractus, si alienis malis evocatus. Sales tui sine dente sint, ioci sine levitate, risus sine cachinno, vox sine clamore, incessus sine tumultu.” Thomas draws from Seneca's De quatuor virtutibus.
66 See, for example, the comments in Elena Pierazzo and Peter A. Stokes, “Putting the Text Back into Context: A Codicological Approach to Manuscript Transcription,” in Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter 2 / Codicology and Paleography in the Digital Age 2, ed. Franz Fischer, Christiane Fritze, and Georg Vogeler, in collaboration with Bernhard Assmann, Malte Rehbein, and Patrick Sahle (Norderstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2010), 397–430, at 398.
67 These arguments extend the views of Horowitz and Menache, L'humour en chaire.
68 Jos Koldeweij, “‘Shameless and Naked Images’: Obscene Badges as Parodies of Popular Devotion,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 493–510.
69 Jean Gerson, Opera Omnia, vol. 3, Exposulatio ad potestates publicas adversus corruptionem juventutis per lascivas imagines (Antwerp: 1706), col. 291–292.
70 Nicola MacDonaldson, “Introduction,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola MacDonald (York: University of York Press, 2014), 1–17, at 6–9.
71 Megan H. Foster-Campbell, “Pilgrimage Through the Pages: Pilgrims’ Badges in Late Devotional Manuscripts,” in Push Me, Pull You, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura D. Gelfand, vol. 1, Imaginative, Emotional, Physical, and Spatial Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 227–274.
72 Malcolm Jones, “The Sexual and Secular Badges,” in Heilig en profaan, ed. H. J. E. van Beuningen, A. M. Koldeweij, and D. Kicken, vol. 2, 1200 laatmiddeleeuwse insignes uit openbare en particuliere collecties, (Cothen: Stichting Middeleeuwse Religieuze en Profane Insignes, 2001), 196–206.
73 The obvious theoretical reference point for this type of comic incongruity is Bergson, Le Rire. For a more sophisticated perspective, drawing on Hegelian psychoanalysis, see Zupančič, Alenka, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2007), 23–40Google Scholar.
74 A brief survey appears in Sherry C. M. Lindquist, “Introduction,” in The Meaning of Nudity in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry C. M. Lindquist (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 1–46, at 20–22.
75 Jones, Malcolm, “The Late-Medieval Dutch Pilgrim Badges,” in Carnivalesque, ed. Hyman, Timothy and Malbert, Roger (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000), 98–101Google Scholar. This is cited in Ostkamp, Sebastiaan, “The World Upside Down. Secular Badges and the Iconography of the Late Medieval Period: Ordinary Pins with Multiple Meanings,” Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries 1, no. 2 (November 2009): 107–125Google Scholar, 118.
76 Ostkamp, “The World Upside Down,” 118.
77 Ostkamp, “The World Upside Down,” 123.
78 Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages, esp. 208–210.
79 For a discussion of humor as a way of creating productive philosophical connections between disparate subjects, see Zupančič, The Odd One In, esp. 111–126.
80 Waller, Gary, The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 Barbara Freitag, Sheela-na-gigs: Unravelling an Enigma (London: Routledge, 2004), 23–46. See also Eamonn Kelly, “Irish Sheela-na-gigs and Related Figures,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. by Nicola MacDonald (York: University of York Press, 2014), 124–137.
82 Hardwick, Paul, “The Monkeys’ Funeral in the Pilgrimage Window, York Minster,” Art History 23, no. 2 (June 2000): 290–299CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83 Chunko-Dominguez, Betsy, English Gothic Misericord Carvings: History from the Bottom Up (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 35–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
84 These are the identifying codes given at “The Misericords and history of the Boston Stump, St Botolph's,” Misericords (website), accessed July 2019, http://www.misericords.co.uk/boston_stump.html. For details of the Saint Botolph's misericords, see Grössinger, Christa, The World Upside-Down: English Misericords (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 102Google Scholar.
85 Simonsen, Margrete Figenschou, “Medieval Pilgrim Badges: Souvenirs or Valuable Charismatic Objects?,” in Charismatic Objects: From Roman Times to the Middle Ages, ed. Vedeler, Marianne, Røstad, Ingunn Marit, Kristoffersen, Siv, and Glørstad, Ann Zanette Tsigaridas (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2018), 169–196Google Scholar.
86 This view is explored in Cooke, Thomas D., “Pornography, the Comic Spirit, and the Fabliaux,” in The Humor of the Fabliaux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Cooke, Thomas Darlington and Honeycutt, Benjamin L. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), 137–162Google Scholar.