A Cultural History of Comedy in the Middle Ages, ed. Martha Bayless. London, New York, et al.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, paperback 2024, xii, 217 pp., 30 b/w ill.

Talking about humor, laughter, or comedy in the Middle Ages is a very rewarding scholarly enterprise especially because we still contend with the major myth perpetuated especially by famous Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) that laughter was not allowed in the medieval Church, and, by extension, was viewed negatively in society at large. To state it bluntly, all people throughout time have laughed, or expressed humor in one way or the other, but everything depends, of course, on the cultural and philosophical context. The present book is the second volume in a whole series of volumes tracing the history of humor from antiquity to the modern age, here focusing on the time from 1000 to 1400 C.E. This is not the first effort to come to terms with laughter in cultural history, as the compiled bibliography at the end richly confirms. Hence, the question arises what might make the contributions to this book edited by the historian Martha Bayless innovative or valuable. The answer rests in their collective effort to shed light on a vast range of literary, art-historical, and historical sources confirming that people in the Middle Ages, both within the Church and in secular society, were certainly highly interested in comedy, which subsequently proved to be a rather complex phenomenon which is approached here from very different perspectives.