Medieval culture: Women and Laughter in Medieval Literature

Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature

By Lisa Perfetti

A likely question in the mind of some readers of this book is how anything can be known about the laughter of women who lived more than five centuries ago. Scholars interested in medieval women have long been frustrated by the difficulty of researching women’s lives given that the majority of texts we have about them are written by men. The difficulty of studying women’s laughter is compounded by the fact that what texts we do have are part of an elite written culture and can only hint at the kinds of oral interactions that would have taken place between the man and woman of the street.

Click here to read the preface of the book