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Abstract
Historians of medieval laughter have, over the past few decades, imagined the thirteenth century as a period of Christian rapprochement with laughter and humour. Whereas in the twelfth century and before, laughter was largely associated – in art, exegesis, narrative and in preaching – with diabolism and damnation, the consensus is that in the 1200s and beyond Christian culture began deploying and preaching laughter as a positive spiritual expression and strategy. Above all, scholars have identified this shift with the thought and practice of the Dominican Order. This paper enriches this narrative by analysing the neglected exempla collection of the Dominican preacher Arnold of Liège (d. c.1308). Reading Arnold's collection – which harshly forbids laughter – in relief to a number of similar compilations made by Dominicans in the same period, offers an image of how the significance of laughter had become pluralised in mendicant theology by 1300, and of how old ideas of a radically negative laughter persisted in haunting the pulpits and street corners of the thirteenth century.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Jay Diehl and Brigitte Bedos-Rezak for helping me when the idea for this article was in its earlier stages, and to Anne Mulhall and Todd Foley for reading drafts and for all their help along the way. I am very grateful too for the helpful comments and suggestions of the two anonymous readers for the Journal of Medieval History. Any errors in the text are entirely my own. Finally, special thanks to Kim Clark for a much-needed lift to Oxford to look at manuscripts.
Notes
1 The following abbreviations are used in this paper: AN: Alphabetum narrationum; BL: London, British Library; De Vitry, Exempla: T.F. Crane, ed., The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry. Publications of the Folk-Lore Society 26 (London: Folk-Lore Society, 1890); PL: Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina.
2 The issue is first mentioned in Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, in Sancti Gregorii Papae I, cognomento magni, Opera omnia, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 75 (Paris: Garnier fratres editores, 1902), cols. 881D–882B (IX, xxvii, 42). Other examples of this interpretation from the twelfth century include: Hildebert of Lavardin, Sermones, in Venerabilis Hilderberti, primo Cenomanensis episcopi deinde Turonensis archiepiscopi, Opera omnia, vol. 1, ed. J.J. Bourassé. PL 171 (Paris: Garnier fratres editores, 1893), cols. 701B–C; Adam of Dryburgh, De tripartito tabernaculo, in Adami Scoti, canonici regularis ordinis Praemonstratensis, Opera omnia, vol. 1, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 198 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1855), cols. 771C–D (XII: 166). The matter is also discussed in Jacques Le Goff, ‘Jésus a-t-il ri?’ L'Histoire 158 (1992): 72–4.
3 Among recent exponents of this view is Stefan Bießenecker, ‘A Small History of Laughter, or When Laughter Has to Be Reasonable’, in Behaving Like Fools: Voice, Gesture, and Laughter in Texts, Manuscripts, and Early Books, eds. Lucy Perry and Alexander Schwarz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 193–222. On the twelfth-century hostility towards laughter, see Jacques Le Goff, ‘Laughter in the Middle Ages’, in A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, eds. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 40–53. Le Goff's general periodisation has been largely upheld in two more recent works: Georges Minois, Histoire du rire et de la dérision (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 95–215; and Jean Verdon, Rire au moyen âge (Paris: Perrin, 2001). For an alternative view, highlighting the proliferation of clerical use of humorous material around the year 1200, see Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: the Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
4 On developments in Christian art, see Willibald Sauerländer, ‘Vom Gelächter des Teufels zur Ironie der Philosophen’, Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste 13 (1999): 30–70; and Paul Binski, ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile’, Art History 20 (1997): 350–74.
5 ‘Vel risus dei laetitia est quia gaudet cum ardentius quaeritur a nobis. Gaudium ergo facit ei de paena qui per sancta desideria pro eius amore se castigat.’ Biblia Latina cum glossa ordinaria. 4 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992) 2: 395.
6 F. Barlow, ed. and trans., The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 102–7; Bernard of Clairvaux, Super Cantica canticorum, in Bernhard von Clairvaux, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Winkler. 10 vols. (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1990–9), 6: 642 (Sermo 85: 11).
7 See, for example, Peter the Chanter, Verbum adbreviatum, ed. Monique Boutry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 379 (Textus Prior, cap. 60), ‘interiore … leticia bona’.
8 The ‘risus capax’ was understood in the Middle Ages, from Aristotle by way of Boethius, as an essential property of human nature. See I.M. Resnick, ‘“Risus Monasticus”: Laughter and Medieval Culture’, Revue Bénédictine 97 (1987): 90–100.
9 On the inseparability of rule and life, see Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
10 Jacques Le Goff, Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Christine Rhone (London: Routledge, 2004), 122–3. For an example of how Francis’ laughter was added to one account by Thomas of Celano, see Rosalind B. Brooke, The Image of St Francis: Responses to Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 143.
11 A.H. Thomas, ed., Constitutiones antiquae Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1215‒1237 (Leuven: Dominikanenklooster, 1965), 1: 21, 36‒7.
12 Jeannine Horowitz and Sophia Menache, L'humour en chaire: le rire dans l’église médiévale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1994).
13 On this point, see also Le Goff, ‘Laughter in the Middle Ages’, 40‒53, and Verdon, Rire au moyen âge, 24‒9.
14 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 18, eds. J. Mortensen and E. Alarcón, trans. L. Shapcote (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), 591‒8 (II IIae, question 168, articles 1‒4). For the reference to eutrapelia, see 595 (article 3).
15 Gerardus de Fracheto, Vitae fratrum Ordinis Praedicatorum necnon cronica Ordinis ab anno MCCIII usque ad MCCLIV … , ed. B.M. Reichert. Monumenta Ordinis Praedicatorum historica 1 (Louvain: Typis E. Charpentier & J. Schoonjans, 1896), 144–5 (III, 42): ‘Karissimi, ridete fortiter et non dimittatis propter istum fratrem; ego do vobis licenciam; et vere bene debetis gaudere et ridere, quia exivitis de carcere dyaboli, et fracta sunt dura vincula illius, quibus multis annis tenuit vos ligatos. Ridete ergo, karissimi, ridete.’ All translations in this article are my own unless otherwise stated.
16 For instance, one manuscript finishes with a precise date: ‘Anno domini M°CCC°VIII die martis ante festum S. Mauri abbatis mense Januarii fuerunt complete iste pecie.’ Oxford, St John's College Library, MS 112, f. 222. For a general discussion of the dating criteria for the AN, see Jean T. Welter, L'exemplum dans la littérature religeuse et didactique du moyen âge (Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), 309.
17 Although over 50 manuscripts of the AN survive, I have made my transcriptions from BL, MS Harley 268, ff. 45r–201v. This manuscript is widely considered to be among the most reliable. See G.R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 302.
18 For a full list of the extant MSS of the AN, see Welter, L'exemplum, 313–14, n. 66. For details of translations, see Colette Ribaucourt, ‘Alphabet of Tales’, in Les exempla médiévaux: introduction à la recherche, suivie des tables critiques de l'Index exemplorum de Frederic C. Tubach, eds. Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Carcassone: Garae / Hesiode, 1992), 199–216 (216).
19 Once attributed to Étienne of Besançon (d. 1294), eighth Master General of the Dominicans, B. Hauréau later questioned the authorship. J.A. Herbert took up the discussion, and, after detecting a name encrypted in the prologue to the collection, named Arnold of Liège as the compiler. See J.A. Herbert, ‘The Authorship of the Alphabetum narrationum’, The Library, 2nd series, 6 (1905): 94–101.
20 Arnold is listed as ‘Magistri in theologia Parisiis’ and ‘Arnulphus Leodiensis, licenciatus anno Domini MCCCV’. See Heinrich Denifle, ‘Quellen zur Gelehrtengeschichte des Predigerordens’, Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 2 (1986): 212. For further comments on Arnold, see A. Teetaert, ‘La littérature quodlibetique’, Ephemerides Theologiae Lovanienses 14 (1937): 77–105 (84–5).
21 Denifle, ‘Quellen zur Gelehrtengeschichte’, 233.
22 A full list of the rubrics can be found in Jacques Le Goff, ‘Le vocabulaire des exempla d'après l’Alphabetum narrationum (début XIVe siècle)’, in La lexicographie du latin médiéval et ses rapports avec les recherches actuelles sur la civilization du moyen-âge. Colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, no. 589 (Paris: CNRS, 1981), 321–32.
23 The alphabetical form became popular, particularly among mendicants, from the thirteenth century onwards. See H.G. Pfander, ‘Medieval Friars and Some Alphabetical Reference-Books for Sermons’, Medium Aevum 3 (1934): 19–29. The fourteenth century then went on to become what Welter described as ‘la période des grandes compilations à ordre alphabétique’: L'exemplum, 304–19.
24 This was a form unique, at the time, to the AN. See the introduction in De Vitry, Exempla, lxxi–lxxii.
25 As Humbert of Romans (Master General of the Dominican Order, 1254–63, d. 1277) wrote, preachers needed to have at hand materials ‘for all types of men, for all kinds of occasions’. Cited in R.F. Bennett, The Early Dominicans: Studies in Thirteenth-Century Dominican History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 78.
26 For a general overview of the genre, see Welter, L'exemplum; for a more recent discussion, see Claude Bremond, Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, L'exemplum. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 40 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996).
27 H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 91.
28 On this matter, Jacques Le Goff wrote: ‘les exempla ne sont pas un reflet des structures de la société et du comportement quotidien des catégories socio-professionelles … ’ Instead, he argues, they manifest ‘le moment où des éléments de ces comportements sociaux entrent dans le discours idéologique’: Bremond, Le Goff and Schmitt, L'exemplum, 80.
29 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 563. Laughter is examined, briefly, under the rubric of Gaudium (f. 58r).
30 J.T. Welter, ed., La Tabula exemplorum secundum ordinem alphabeti: recueil d'exempla compilé en France à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris: E.-H. Guitard, 1926).
31 J.T. Welter, ed., Le Speculum laicorum: édition d'une collection d'exempla, composée en Angleterre à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris: A. Picard, 1914). Welter cites 80 manuscripts from England alone.
32 Although two may seem to be a small number of stories, scores of different topics in the AN were allocated the same space, and many topics in fact received less. See the enumeration of tales by topic in Le Goff, ‘Le vocabulaire des exempla’.
33 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 181v: ‘Quidam senex vidit quemdam iuvenem ridentem et dixit coram selo et terra redditur sumus rationem totius vite nostre et tu rides.’
34 BL, Harley MS 268, f.181v: ‘Ridere non debent habentes oculum ad iudicium ultimum.’
35 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 181v: ‘Ridere non debent advertentes pericula mundi.’
36 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 181v: ‘Tunc rex incitavit enim ab ridendis. Et illo: quomodo possum rideo cum ista incommoda video que in circuitu sunt coram me. Ad hoc rex: et ego quoniam possum rideo … ’
37 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 133r: ‘Demone iracundis fuit illusus.’
38 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 133v.
39 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 103r.
40 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 138r.
41 Verba seniorum, III: 23, in Appendix ad monumenta sex priorum ecclesiae saeculorum vitae patrum … , vol. 1, ed. J.-P. Migne. PL 73 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1879), col. 864b.
42 Simon Tugwell, The Way of the Preacher (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979), 56.
43 B.M. Reichert, ed., Acta capitulorum generalium Ordinis Praedicatorum, vol. 1. Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum historica 3 (Rome: In domo generalitia, 1898), 55–60.
44 Verba seniorum, II: 84, in Appendix ad monumenta … vitae patrum, ed. Migne, cols. 775A–775B.
45 The work is cited 26 times in the AN, and provides the source for tales across a range of subjects.
46 See Tubach, Index exemplorum, in Les exempla médiévaux, eds. Berlioz and Polo de Beaulieu, 377–8, for a list of 53 other collections where variations on this tale can be found.
47 De Vitry, Exempla, 3, number 8: ‘felicem’.
48 Hermann Österley, ed., Gesta Romanorum (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1872), 498–500 (cap. 143): ‘gaudium’.
49 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, f. 107r: ‘Non possum … gaudere.’
50 For comments on Arnold's prologue and his discretion with source material, see Welter, L'exemplum, 310–12.
51 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 141r.
52 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 133v.
53 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 74v.
54 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 82v. An interesting association between idle words and laughter had been made more specifically in a tale from a thirteenth-century Franciscan collection. Here, the Devil is described writing down instances of laughter in church to count against the congregation in the afterlife. A.G. Little, ed., Liber exemplorum ad usum praedicantium. British Society of Franciscan Studies 1 (Aberdeen: British Society of Franciscan Studies, 1908), 67–8.
55 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 95v: ‘Gaudent mali de malis.’
56 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 151v. Arnold cites as his source ‘Libro purgatorio beati Patricii’. A version of this popular tale was also featured in one of his chief sources, Caesarius of Heisterbach. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. and German trans. Horst Schneider and Nikolaus Nösges. Fontes Christiani 86. 5 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 1: 290‒8 (1: 32).
57 See Tubach, Index exemplorum, in Les exempla médiévaux, eds. Berlioz and Polo de Beaulieu, 219, no. 2782.
58 This tale is numbered 214 in Stephen of Bourbon's collection: R.A. Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques, légendes, et apologus tirés du receuil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon: Tractatus de diversis materiis praedicabilibus (Paris: H. Loones, 1877), 186.
59 De Vitry, Exempla, 28, number 67.
60 BL, MS Harley 268, ff. 125r–v: ‘Histriones aliquando maliciose se vindicant.’
61 ‘Nec vultum hilarem nec aliquam invenit pietatem’: De Vitry, Exempla, 28, number 67.
62 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 77v: ‘Gaudium quandoque nocet corpori.’
63 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 77v: ‘Gaudium est aliquando causa mortis corporalis … Mors aliquando ex gaudio causatur.’
64 See, for example, one of Arnold's principal sources, Stephen of Bourbon: Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques … d’Étienne de Bourbon, number 55. Here, a spell causes a ploughman to die laughing madly.
65 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 77v.
66 BL, MS Harley 268, ff. 45r–v.
67 De Vitry, Exempla, 22, number 56. Compare with BL, MS Harley 268, f. 75v.
68 De Vitry, Exempla, 22, number 56: ‘Audivi de quodam sacerdote qui vocem asinarum et horribilem habebat et tamen se bene cantare putabat.’
69 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 75v: ‘ … sacerdos quidam optime credebat cantare et tamen horribilitis cantabat.’
70 BL, MS Harley 268, f. 75v: ‘Cantus pertantes proprius multos decipit qui credunt bene cantare et pessime cantant.’
71 Horowitz and Menache, L'humour en chaire.
72 De Vitry, Exempla, xli–xlii: ‘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.’
73 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. Schneider and Nösges, 2: 794 (4: 50).
74 Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques … d’Étienne de Bourbon, number 55.
75 Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques … d’Étienne de Bourbon, number 100.
76 Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques … d’Étienne de Bourbon, number 274.
77 Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques … d’Étienne de Bourbon, number 282.
78 Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques … d’Étienne de Bourbon, numbers 6, 291, 437.
79 Lecoy de la Marche, ed., Anecdotes historiques … d’Étienne de Bourbon, number 472.
80 Noted in J.A. Herbert, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 3 (London: British Museum, 1910), 421.
81 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. G.P. Maggioni. 2 vols. (Tavarnuzze-Firenze: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998), 1: 299 (number 46).
82 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. Maggioni, 2: 1167 (number 148).
83 Thomas of Cantimpré, Thomae Cantipratensis Bonum universale de apibus, ed. E. Berger (Paris: Thorin, 1895), II, 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.’
84 Ovid, Ars amatoria, Book 3, ed. R.K. Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 60 (l. 283). Ovid describes how women should laugh delicately, without showing their teeth.
85 See, for example, John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum, vol. 2, ed. C.C.J. Webb. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), I: 8 and VIII: 10.
86 Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale, II, 57: 39
87 Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale, II, 30: 51.
88 Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale, II, 29: 11.
89 Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale, II, 10: 8.
90 See, for instance, Thomas of Cantimpré, Bonum universale, II, 37: 3.
91 For a discussion of this work, as well as a partial transcription, see S.D. Forte, ‘A Cambridge Dominican Collector of Exempla in the Thirteenth Century’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 28 (1958): 115–48. Also, see the comments and partial translation in David Jones, Friars’ Tales: Thirteenth-Century Exempla from the British Isles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 11–13, 154–88.
92 Welter dates the text as c.1270–9: L'exemplum, 245–6.
93 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, f. 138v.
94 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, f. 127r. For a similar tale in the collection, cf. f. 133v.
95 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, f. 119v.
96 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, ff. 78v–79r. Cf. Jordan of Saxony, Libellus de principiis, ed. H.C. Scheeben. Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum historica 16 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Fratrum Praedicatorum 1935), 79–81 (chapters 116–19).
97 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, ff. 78v–79r.
98 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, f. 129v.
99 BL, MS Royal 7 D I, f. 130r.
100 See n. 15 above.
101 See Le Goff, ‘Laughter’, 40‒53, and Horowitz and Menache, L'humour en chaire, 55‒78.
Additional information
Peter Jones is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.