Introduction: The Ambivalence of Laughter

Early modern dictionaries not only capture the ambivalence of laughter: through the preponderance of negative synonyms that they list – scorn, mock, jeer, fleer, scoff – they also encapsulate its strong association with derision, a word etymologically linked to the Latin ‘ridere’. This derisive strain is evident, for instance, in the way that – in the example above – Randle Cotgrave chose to group ‘ieast’ with verbs utilising the preposition ‘at’, rather than ‘with’. Even his onomatopoeiac ‘tighie’ (‘tee-hee’) is far from neutral, defined by the OED as indicating ‘the sound of a light laugh, usually derisive’. It is this disdainful perception of laughter that dominates early modern discussions of the phenomenon. As Quentin Skinner notes, ‘with the recovery of the classical theory of eloquence – one of the defining achievements of Renaissance culture – the classical theory of laughter was likewise revived’. This was a theory that associated laughter, above all, with contempt: Plato's Republic ‘foreshadows the central principle of Aristotle's analysis when he declares that laughter is almost always connected with the reproving of vice’; Cicero's De Oratore restricts laughter ‘to matters that are in some way either disgraceful or deformed’; Quintilian's De Institutione finds that laughter ‘has its source in things that are either deformed or disgraceful in some way’. Thomas Wilson consequently drew on a long-established tradition when he declared in 1553 that: ‘The occasion of laughter, and the meane that maketh vs merie […] is the fondnes, the filthines, the deformitee, and all suche euill behauior, as we se to bee in other.’

Regarded as a ‘merie’ response to regrettable things, there is thus a duality to early modern conceptions of laughter. This can be seen in Laurent Joubert's Traité du Ris, initially written in Latin in the 1550s and first printed, translated into French, in its complete form in 1579.

The present translation of Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie is meant to foster a greater appreciation of this early French romance, which is one of the works known as the romans d'antiquité. We hope to provide the basis for further study of the Troie in its own right, as well as of its relationship with other authors and with literary and historical works in the Middle Ages and beyond. The legend of Troy has been a direct or indirect source for numerous rewritings that began to appear in antiquity and continued into the twelfth century when the Troie was written. Composed in Latin, French and other vernacular languages, many of these later works were influenced by, or modelled on, all or parts of Benoît's poem. Moreover, a number of new versions continued to exploit Benoît's work for a long time after the period in which he wrote. The love of Briseida produced some remarkable rewrites, as Cressida in Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Criseyde in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Cresseid in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, culminating in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. These rewritings are not translations, but rather adaptations, in fresh contexts, media and narrative modes, of the Troilus–Briseida–Diomedes triangle first found in the Troie, but with different emphases and evaluations. Benoît invented Briseida's change of heart, something that slowly transpired over almost two years of hesitation, a change that Benoît and Briseida herself admit would be controversial. These later rewritings of her story bear out Horace's claim in his Art of Poetry (quoted in our epigraph) that poets would do better to show originality by writing a new version of the Trojan War than by producing something on an entirely new topic. This is obviously also relevant for the new versions of Briseida's loves, and not only because of her altered name. If authors heeded this dictum, Benoît might be considered as a more original twelfth-century French poet than has been recognized by those who have read with some dismay the twenty-three battles that occupy so many lines of his work.

The virtues of pity and chastity dominate Genius’ account of the kingly virtues in Book VII of the Confessio Amantis, but their relationship to one another is not particularly clear. While both might seem at first to be checks on royal rule, Andrew Galloway has argued that in the Confessio, Gower seeks to “redefine pity as a direct expression of power.” Similarly, Yoshiko Kobayashi claims that “Gower assimilated the figure of Pity to the punitive aspect of kingship” in an analysis that examines Gower's work across three languages. In Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household, Elliot Kendall poses chastity as the emblem of a quite different analysis of power: “the exempla of chastity house the poem's most radical assertions of royal obligation,” especially the narrative of Lucrece. While for Kendall, Gower's Confessio as a whole depends upon these forms of obligation to produce the “particularly aristocratic politics” of the noble household, and the Confessio usually valorizes reciprocal relations over magnificence, he still fundamentally agrees with Galloway's reading of Gower's pity: “pity is represented as an instrument rather than a modifier of power, and the defense of pity—even its enactment—is represented by extreme vengeance,” and these representations “render pity a species of magnificence.” While Galloway finds in Gower a “problematic connection of pity and violence,” and Kendall locates in Gower's version of pity “the flaw which reveals the conflicted core of the reciprocalist idea pursued throughout Gower's text” and shows the problem of “negotiations between principles of reciprocity and the treasured keystone of static hierarchy,” I argue that for Gower, pity is a form of the “power over life” that sovereignty claims as the complement to state violence, the “power over death.” This power over life, which Giorgio Agamben locates in his genealogy of modern biopower, is in Gower rooted in the masculine control over sexuality, specifically the virtue of chastity. Pity is thus central to the reading of the exempla of chastity, and rather than being a flaw in Gower's account of the ethics of ruling or directly aligned with violence, is essential to the dynamic apparatus of domination.

This volume argues that laughter and satire played significant roles in political processes and social practices in a range of historical contexts in early modern Britain. Their role was contradictory and ambiguous: laughter and satire both defined or solidified communal boundaries by confronting those who breached social mores and offered potent ways to challenge and corrode those boundaries. Satire did not necessarily provoke laughter, and not all laughter was satirical, but the two were often closely intertwined even though they had slightly separate histories and purposes: both raised questions about when they were appropriate and, as a result, both occupied a highly ambiguous and contested space. Both could foster common identities whilst at the same time being capable of dividing, attacking and subverting those identities, cultural assumptions or political and religious positions. Indeed, this vibrant duality, constructive and destructive, and the fundamental ambiguity about when laughter was appropriate, are reflected in the linguistic inventiveness of the early modern period, when new words to describe types of laughter were forged or when old words acquired new meanings.

To understand what past cultures laughed at, and why they found certain types of laughter objectionable in certain contexts, is to open a window onto the social mores and assumptions of those cultures: to understand in what ways they are both familiar and unfamiliar to us. Because laughter is an instant reaction, it speaks to the heart of those mores. In the words of Robert Darnton: ‘When you realise that you are not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a ceremony – that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.’ Getting the joke helps us to ‘get’ at fundamental assumptions in a given society or culture.

Monks, nuns and friars provided plentiful inspiration for satire and laughter in early sixteenth-century England. Jestbooks, ballads and satires penned in private letters or in published tracts all abounded with humour about those in religious orders. There was no theme more ripe for mockery, irony or satire than the perceived discrepancy between the ideal of strict observance to the rule of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the more sobering reality of monastic existence, a reality frequently expressed through the rhetoric of the seven deadly sins. The difference between ideal and reality was complicated by the monastic double bind ‘between the reforming imperative of withdrawal, and the social imperative of integration’. It was the inability to reconcile such disjunctures that provided the inspiration for much early modern satire, and it was on the theme of monasticism and the religious life in the 1530s that humour became politically charged. This humour, which had been used by those who sought entertainment or those who urged reform, took on new resonances in the 1530s. It was lent a new urgency by the political and religious upheavals of a decade that witnessed one of the greatest transformations in the lives and history of religious men and women in England. In 1534 the Act of Dispensation severed the link between the English monasteries and the pope. Under the authority of Henry VIII as head of the national Church of England, monastic houses were subject to visitations between 1535 and 1539, reports of which were sent to Thomas Cromwell. By 1540, monasticism had been virtually extinguished in England, forcing over ten thousand monks, nuns and friars from the confines of their rule or cloister back into the world. Traditions of anti-monastic satire were exploited by the Henrician government in order to construct a politicised discourse to justify the dissolution of the monasteries.

Anti-monastic satire was certainly not a cause of the dissolution of the monasteries, nor should its existence be read as reflective of widespread opinion that sought the destruction of the religious life. A. G. Dickens's emphasis on using this broad anticlerical discourse as a phenomenon to help explain the welcome acceptance of the Henrician Reformation has long been discredited.

In many of his tales, Gower seems to offer the reader contradictory morals, rendering the text's authority unclear. Gower's adaptations of Ovidian texts further exacerbate the tension between the text and reader, because Gower's text can contradict his readers’ expectations of Ovid's narratives. Gower's reader also knows these myths, at least through the plot summary available from the Latin glosses in the margins of Gower's own text, and for a wellversed audience, every reading of Ovidian retellings, even the first, is a rereading. The reader's informed position means that when reading moment by moment, the reader also stands outside of time, knowing a tale's past, present, and future—and so equipped can question Gower's retelling and supply the authority that the text doesn't seem to claim for itself. In Sciences and the Self, James Simpson encourages this type of reading, arguing that Gower writes in the ironic tradition of Ovid and offers an unreliable text requiring active readers. To him, readers are the ultimate site of authority, able to fill in the blanks that Gower leaves open.

Although Gower's retellings invoke this tension, readers who assert their authority and their own understanding of the Ovidian narrative will miss a key point of Gower's retellings: the absence of irony. I offer as a test case Gower's mode of depicting Ovidian villains who are known for their depravity. Gower writes sympathetically about them, and readers who deem such sympathy ironic ignore his strategy as a writer. To make my argument, I need to define two different forms of sympathy: Hugh White argues for Gower's sympathy for sexual predators like Mundus, Ulysses, and Nectanabus—by his analysis, Gower's villains seem sympathetic in ways that encourage “guiltily immoral” readings because the (male) audience can enjoy these men's cleverness at obtaining power and sex. This reading supports Simpson's thesis that the reader is called on to engage with and decide upon a text that paradoxically both condemns and celebrates sexual aggression. I will discuss a different kind of villain, arguably much less sympathetic, because this second set of villains rapes and kills in cold blood. However, the flavor of sympathy I focus on differs strongly from the “morally dubious sympathy” White describes, in that Gower underscores the villains’ initial goodness rather than foreshadows their evil deeds.

Both the title and the contents of Gower's Cinkante Balades firmly situate the work in the dominant strand of the French courtly lyric of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as it was practiced and defined by the major poets of the era—Machaut, Deschamps, and Froissart—and as it was sustained by their many followers, including, among Gower's contemporaries, Oton de Granson, who spent much of his career in England; Christine de Pizan, who may have begun writing ballades at about the same time as Gower; the aristocratic poets who contributed to the Livre des cent balades, to whose work Gower probably makes a bow in his choice of the round number cinkante; and also many anonymous writers, such as the poets whose works appear alongside those of their better-known peers in the Pennsylvania chansonnier, which was copied at just about the same time as the manuscript in which the Cinkante Balades is contained. Gower's relation to this tradition is complex. While he clearly adopted many of the most recognizable conventions of form, diction, and theme, he equally clearly made his own choices, some with an eye to the design of his collection as a whole, some as part of an ongoing dialogue with the poets whose works he knew, and some because of his own understanding of the expressive function of the lyric. There is a great deal of variety in the Cinkante Balades for anyone who reads them closely, but because of the choices that Gower made, the work also has some distinctive qualities that set it apart from every earlier collection of ballades.

The date and the order of composition of the poems that now make up the Cinkante Balades must remain unknown, but there is evidence that, like the contents of the manuscript in which they appear, their present arrangement is the result of at least some effort to give shape and order to the collection. The ordering is particularly evident at the end. The last four poems (48–51) switch from personal address to more general reflections on the nature of love, the last three in the voice of the poet, and the last of these turns to a different sort of love entirely as the poet speaks of his affection for the Blessed Virgin in what was clearly intended as the conclusion.

Maps and texts: locating geographical knowledge in universal histories

In medieval universal histories there is a long tradition of including geographical as well as historical content about the world. Sometimes this geographical information is solely in textual form, sometimes it is expressed in the form of a world map and sometimes it appears as both. The focus of this essay is one particular English example, the Polychronicon, compiled by Ranulph Higden in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, where, in a number of copies, a map and text are used to present a geographical description of the wider world. This provides an opportunity to look closely at the relationship between visual and textual geographies in Higden's Polychronicon, to explore how connections between them can offer insights into how these universal histories formed a basis for engaging with world geographies.

Higden's Polychronicon exists in numerous manuscripts, and some of those from the fourteenth century that contain mappaemundi have long received scholarly recognition by historians of cartography and geography. Most studies have either focused on the maps or the Polychronicon text, rather than bringing the two together, yet of course they were read as an entity. This issue of medieval maps so often becoming detached from their contexts is something that has been identified by Evelyn Edson. The aim of this paper – focusing on one fourteenth-century manuscript of Higden's Polychronicon, containing not just one but two maps – is to address Edson's concern. It does so by examining a copy of the Polychronicon once in the possession of Ramsey Abbey, in Huntingdonshire, in eastern England, but now London, British Library, Royal MS 14 C IX. Putting maps back into their context – placing maps – is not just a useful way of revisiting questions of how the maps and texts worked together to form an image of the world, but also a means to explore another contextual dimension, the geographical context or locale within which the manuscripts were produced and consumed.

In School-days of Eminent Men (1858), John Timbs promises to narrate “the early buddings of genius, and formation of character, through which may be gained glimpses of many of the hidden thoughts and secret springs by which masterminds have moved the world.” His brief entry on Richard II is notable for its focus upon Gower; in the section titled “The Education of Richard II—His Patronage of Gower,” Timbs writes,

It is not surprising that Timbs (a nineteenth-century antiquarian of prodigious output) and his Victorian audience so casually glosses over Richard II's reign (especially given the Watt Tyler “unpleasantness”), or that rather than focus on Chaucer as the instrumental voice of Richard's reign Timbs constructs an image of a “newly arisen” English vernacular literature deriving from Richard's “patronage” of Gower.

Timbs refers, of course, to the so-called patronage scene in the Ricardian recensions of the “Prologue” to the Confessio Amantis, wherein (at least in the early recensions of the poem) the narrator of the “Prologue” to the Confessio is summoned aboard Richard's barge and asked by Richard to compose something new. Whether or not this scene marked a consequential moment in Richard II's education, as Timbs suggests, it certainly has become one of the defining moments of Gower criticism, given the presence of that scene in the Ricardian recensions of the Confessio and its removal in the Lancastrian recensions; one of the more persistent issues in Gower studies has been understanding these dedicatory changes between versions of the Confessio Amantis. Nigel Saul, for example, argues that Gower's rationale for switching allegiances was Richard's failure to exhibit moderate self-rule, as evidenced by Richard's lack of selfdiscipline in incidents from the 1380s and 1390s which include the king's quarrel with the City of London in 1392, a quarrel cited as far back as Fisher for this change.

Let me start with a scene from a book by anthropologist, historian, novelist, but above all interpreter then translator of West African oral cultures and literatures into French: Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901–1991) from Mali. The book is entitled Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar le Sage de Bandiagara (literally: ‘The life and teachings of Tierno Bokar, the Sage of Bandiagara’) and is the biography of his master and guide in Islamic sciences and spirituality (Tierno means ‘master’). The scene in question takes place in 1937, in the Malian town of Mopti under French colonial rule.

HINSEY: We have now come to your university years. What kinds of entrance examinations were there, and what role did political loyalty play?

VENCLOVA: There were entrance examinations, and rather difficult ones at that. These tested not just a prospective student's knowledge and abilities, but first and foremost his or her political reliability. Komjaunuoliai activists were clearly favored; an ill-prepared person from a provincial school could be given precedence over a brilliant applicant, since social origin, demonstrable pro- Soviet views, or a good recommendation from the local authorities were taken into account (as far as I recall, this was never an official policy, but everybody knew it to be the case). It was very helpful if one's family had been victimized by the partisans, and even more so if, as a high school student, one had already distinguished oneself as an informer. Still, anyone who had received his or her school-leaving certificate with distinction was exempt from taking a second set of examinations. There were seven such individuals in our class, including Romas Katilius and me (this high number corresponded to the solid educational level of our school). Thus, I had two free months before my studies began. My mother and grandfather decided to offer me a car trip to Leningrad (my cousin Andrius, who was still in high school, came along as well). The journey also became the occasion to acquaint ourselves with the other two Baltic countries, Latvia and Estonia. Andrius, who had inherited artistic talent from Aunt Maria, drew sketches of the places we saw, while I tried to observe and remember.

HINSEY: Both Latvia and Estonia shared Lithuania's fate in 1940. Though collectively called “the Baltics,” these countries have different histories—

VENCLOVA: Yes, and the differences were palpable. Latvia and Estonia did not experience independent statehood prior to 1918, and had virtually no history of uprisings against tsarist power. In the thirteenth century, both were conquered by the Teutonic (strictly speaking, Livonian) knights (Danes and Swedes were also colonizing the region). This might in certain respects be considered a misfortune, but it ultimately resulted in a relatively peaceful and civilized way of life. Latvians and Estonians were converted to Christianity much earlier than Lithuanians, and they became Lutherans in the sixteenth century, whereas Lithuanians remained Catholics.

HINSEY: Why don't we start by speaking about your earliest memories, for example, the house where you were born?

VENCLOVA: The house was in Klaipėda (also called Memel), a harbor town on the Baltic Sea. But I don't have any memory of it since our family moved when I was less than two years old. The history of Memel is as complicated as any history in that part of Europe. The town started as a fortress established in 1252 by German knights on terrain inhabited by pagan Lithuanians (they also founded the much bigger and better-known Baltic cities, including Riga and Königsberg, at approximately the same time). The knights attempted to subdue and baptize the Lithuanians, but without much success; they only managed to impose their rule on a narrow strip of land around the town, a region that later acquired some fame as Memel Territory, or Memelgebiet. In any case, the land was considered to be part of Germany for seven hundred years. After World War I, it was separated from the German Reich by the Treaty of Versailles, and ended up as an autonomous region of Lithuania.

HINSEY: Could you describe what Klaipėda was like at that time?

VENCLOVA: In 1937, the town was small, provincial, and German-speaking. The architecture was typically Prussian: timber-framed houses and Lutheran churches with pointed steeples. Incidentally, Thomas Mann used to spend his summers in Nida, a village not far away (he started writing Joseph and His Brothers there), but he did not return after leaving for Switzerland in 1933. In the countryside around Klaipėda, as the town was now officially called, the people mainly spoke Lithuanian, but the Memellanders were Lutheran and looked down on the Catholic and definitely less civilized inhabitants of “Lithuania proper.” Most of them succumbed easily to Nazi sloganeering. In March 1939, Hitler took Memel and Memel Territory back: it is still remembered that he arrived on a warship and delivered a speech from the balcony of the old theater, heartily applauded by the majority of Memellanders (even if the speech was on the short side, due to his seasickness).