Boccaccio, in the second half of the fourteenth century, and Rabelais, in the first half of the sixteenth century, are the best-known authors of a period that saw an extraordinary flowering of tales which, in contrast to the primacy of the soul preached by the church, celebrated the human body with all its needs and appetites, and the human mind in all its shrewdness, without moralistic censure. While in contemporary society such behavior would not pass without sanction, there was a tradition of telling or enacting “rude” stories for entertainment, whether at private convivial gatherings or in public at particular times, especially Shrovetide, before the restrictions of Lent were imposed. While at courts, a fool would enjoy that freedom of expression at all times, anybody could then take on the role of a fool, as is still the case in areas that have a living Carnival tradition.
In Germany, the fifteenth-century Nuremburg Shrovetide plays (Fasnachtsspiele) are the best-known examples of sexually explicit or scatological texts, but there was also a tradition of short verse tales (Mären), still the literary vehicle for Hans Sachs in the sixteenth century, while in Italy and France prose had become the normal form of narrative. Many texts make it clear that they were meant to be “performed” to an audience, and the prevalence of dialogue suggests role-playing by the narrator.
Sebastian Coxon, Lecturer in German at University College, London, has previously shown his expertise in the field in about a dozen articles or contributions to symposia, and in this book he brings his insights together in a systematic way. The three parts are entitled Laughter (with chapters on “Laughter at Comic Tales” and “Laughter in Comic Tales”), Narrative Design (with chapters “Time and Space” and “Speech and Dialogue”), and Thematic Content (with chapters “The Physical Body” and “The Social Body”), plus an introduction and a conclusion. I will first try to give an idea of the contents.
Laughter. One semantic difficulty is that German lachen covers both laughter and smiling, and its precise meaning has to be deducted from qualifications, whether the passages are descriptive or imitative. Loud, uncontrollable laughter is indicated by bodily manifestations (sound, possibly farting or even shitting); as is to be expected, it is the domain of men, lower classes, and fools, against the smiling of women, upper classes, and wise persons. In descriptions of laughter, collective laughter exercises a wide range of social and communicative functions; it occurs even among saints and church congregations and asserts community values against deviant behavior or deviant communities, and it may be compared to the canned laughter in modern shows. Individual laughter is more polyvalent. It has a normative function when endorsing traditional values, but can also be used for deception or as an indication of the laugher’s foolishness, and thus invite retribution.
Time and Space. The tales are oriented towards action and dialogue, so descriptions of time and place are sparing, sometimes no more than "once upon a time," but the feasts of the Christian calendar, saints’ days inclusive, are used, or the seasons. Half a year seems to be the time frame within which a story can develop. Nighttime invites sexual activities and shady designs, but adultery can also occur in daytime when the husband is at work. People who can be idle during the day are seen as suspect. Public and private space are not as separate as in modern times; workshops and living-rooms merge, just as on farms, animals and people can inhabit a common space. The back entrance to a house is usually the place for secret or illicit comings and goings. Bedrooms are associated with secrecy, with physical or emotional intimacy—other locations for sexual intercourse are “transgressive.” The narrative events invoke the violation of temporal or spatial boundaries; the design aims at rendering morally or socially transgressive behavior as conspicuous as possible.
Speech. Some tales consist almost exclusively of direct speech and are not much different from solo plays. As in the Latin Facetiae of the time, the comic potential of both witty and foolish speech is recognized. Sexual acts or genitalia are referred to either metaphorically (e.g., as “thirst”) or in an explicitly vulgar fashion. Women are depicted as being more eager on penis than men on vulva, which is demonized; that agrees with the concept of females being more sexually inclined. An excessively scatological story is attributed to an old woman.
Dialogue. Dialogue depends for its effect on a polarized relationship of the figures. With notions of authority and subordination brought into play (master/servant, husband/wife), the greater is the potential for outright hostility, and the more striking is the comic effect. In many dialogues the interlocuters make false assumptions. A speaker may impose his own particular understanding of a situation on the other; control over the speech of others represents the ultimate act of self-assertion. Witty (mis)communication, word-play and punning, confusion of literal and figurative meanings, and irony abound. The widely-known Dialogue of Solomon and Markolf may have inspired the use of parody, willful distortion, or misunderstanding, as Markolf provides sexual or scatological ripostes to Solomon’s “wisdom.”
The Physical Body. The human body is presented as a collection of appetites and needs, some not subject to control (pissing, shitting, erections). Nakedness is attractive in young people, repulsive in the old. Physical deficiencies, except for blindness, are laughed at quite cruelly. Violence is intrinsic in antagonistic situations. The more drastic it is, the more acute is the onlookers’ pleasure; but it rarely leads to a lasting maiming of the victim; it is mostly the face or the hair that are attacked with bare hands or with sticks. Biting is disapproved of as bestial.
The Social Body. The tales tell us a great deal about secular urban society as it had developed in the Later Middle Ages, its values and its attitudes. While tradesmen and merchants, who must have been the main consumers of such entertainment, also figure in them, the main butts of ridicule are priests, especially their uncelibate practices, and peasants, seen as ignorant and naïve, plus other outsider groups such as Jews and vagrants, while wandering scholars, poor but living by their wits and taking advantage of material or sexual opportunities, are pictured tolerantly. Jocular tales are mostly trickster tales, and the cleverness of the trickster, whether it be Reynard the Fox or Till Ulenspiegel, is admired, even though in real life such actions would not go unpunished. They invite benevolent laughter, while punitive laughter acts as a tool of social regulation: settled burghers against suspect have-nots, Christians against Jews, the head of the household against uppity wives. Servants, during this period, acquire a more prominent and independent role than they had before; often they are seen in league with either their master or their mistress.
This book is a splendid example of the transdisciplinary approach that historical studies (in the widest sense) have taken in the last couple of decades, and of what we can learn about the thinking and the attitudes of “ordinary” people in earlier times. The author has drawn on a mass of recent publications, primarily in German and English, but also in French (in translation, where available) and occasionally in other Romance languages, on literature, sociology, philosophy, theology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, all precisely documented in his copious notes. He is up-to-date in his awareness of the modern embedding of texts, in what they say about producers and recipients, and the general mental and social background of the places and times where they originated or were performed. He uses both manuscript and published materials to show variants of one type of story. Quotations in the text are given in the original and in translation; in the notes, where they are more frequent, only in fifteenth-century German.
Only rarely are we given summaries of the whole of these (rather simple) stories, but the author has to supply, time and again, enough character(s) and plot to make his point clear, which makes for a lot of repetition—just as the (often long) titles of the publications he refers to in his notes are repeated in full time and again. A better arrangement would have been to first give summaries of the most frequently used tales to which he could have referred to later in the text. The Shrovetide plays, in a similar “coarse” vein, often by the same authors and on the same or similar plots, are shortly discussed in the conclusion, but it would be good to see them treated together with the similar verse tales; Coxon would be the ideal man to give us a book on Hans Folz and/or Rosenplüt.
The book is attractively illustrated with appropriate woodcuts, but otherwise, printed in single column on almost quarto-size pages, not easy to read, especially the smaller print in the voluminous notes after each chapter, the more so as the current fashion of printing in grey, rather than black, is followed. There are more than thirty pages of bibliography, and a four-page index. Readers might be tempted to think that author’s name is a suggestive pseudonym; it is not.
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[Review length: 1516 words • Review posted on May 26, 2011]