Were the Middle Ages funny? To answer that question, Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu hunt through some of the rudest, silliest and surprising works in English literature in search of the Medieval sense of humour.
Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu are both writers and historians, and regular contributors to the London Review of Books.
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Were the Middle Ages funny? To answer that question, Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu hunt through some of the rudest, silliest and surprising works in English literature in search of the Medieval sense of humour.
Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu are both writers and historians, and regular contributors to the London Review of Books.
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
If you’re looking for advice on sustaining a marriage, or robbing a grave, or performing liver surgery, then a series of self-help stories by a 14th-century Spanish prince is a good place to start. Tales of Count Lucanor, written between 1328 and 1335 by Prince Juan Manuel of Villena, is one of the earliest works of Castilian prose. The tales follow the familiar shape of many medieval stories, presented as a kind of medicine to improve the lives of its readers by example. Yet in his preface Manuel makes an unusual assertion about the individuality of all people, a philosophy that, as Mary and Irina discuss in this episode, leads to bizarre and opaque moral messages intended more to make the reader think for themselves than reach a universal conclusion.
Find a translation of the Tales here: https://elfinspell.com/CountLucanor1.html
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
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Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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