Comic Tales Of The Middle Ages

The evolution of medieval comic literature and the development of man's notion of the comic is demonstrated by three groups of comic narratives composed in Latin in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Wolterbeek's translations of the poems into idiomatic English is accompanied by the original Latin texts as well as by extensive commentary. The ridicula, nugae, and satyrae anticipate the literary flowering of the High Middle Ages and were the Latin precursors of the Old French fabliaux, other "popular" genres, and the comediae elegiacae, the ancestors of Renaissance drama.