Medieval Joke Poetry

The Cantigas d'Escarnho E de Mal Dizer
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-0-674-01664-4
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 50, 192 Seiten, Format (B × H): 164 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 286 g

Reihe: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature

Medieval Joke Poetry examines the intersection of jokes, laughter, insults, and poetry in a collection of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century medieval Iberian songs known as the Cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer. Written in Galician-Portuguese, these “songs of mockery and insult” make up a heterogeneous corpus whose witticisms are by turns funny and vicious, crudely obscene and exquisitely sophisticated, playful and deadly serious. Benjamin Liu’s readings disentangle the complex verbal strategies of these joke-poems in order to reveal the latent cultural tensions that underlie their humor. Wordplay, double meanings, and deliberate combinations of incongruous ideas are intended to elicit laughter, even as they gesture toward the rupture of accepted cultural categories in such manifestly hybrid paradoxes as an “Albardan cavaleiro” (noble buffoon), a “mouro cruzado” (Crusader Moor), or a male “dona salvage” (wild woman). Liu shows how these jokes operate in such varied cultural contexts as the arts of augury and divination, pilgrimage, prostitution, interfaith sexuality, and medical malpractice.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Liu, Benjamin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur

Über Autor(innen)

Liu, Benjamin
Benjamin Liu is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.