Art and its ability to offer us insight into the distinct and often unfamiliar aspects of older cultures is invaluable. And whilst this statement is one that has certainly been uttered thousands of times, it is important that we are often looking back to art as a primary source of historical testimony (wherever viable, of course).
Looking at ‘humour’ historically we have a vast array of examples of what would have been interpreted as humorous, such as the satyr plays of Ancient Greece for instance. And a lot of the ‘evidence’ we have regarding certain types of humour shared during the pre-modern ages exist in the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval period.
You might be familiar with images of medieval animals— specifically medieval cats— that have long since been circulating the internet (though be careful with the labelling of these images as ‘medieval’ as not all of them are dated as such). Online pages dedicated to showing the humour in medieval art are certainly not a new phenomenon and the resurgence and mini ‘renaissance’ of attention towards medieval art certainly invites closer inspection into interpretations of humour in the Middle Ages.
Medieval illuminated manuscripts, in particular, hold a lot of hidden humour within their marginalia. These manuscripts were often serious in nature, mainly of scholarly or religious text. Scribes would often include these images of humour in the marginalia so as to mock the seriousness of the contrasting text. Some notable examples of humour are of human-animal hybrid creatures, or body parts in unexpected places such as: a half-worm half-man creature becoming intoxicated, knights battling snails, nuns with a penis tree etc. These bizarre images we might now look at and also find very humorous.
The humour of these manuscripts would have been spread and shared with the travelling and copying of these medieval manuscripts, with the overtaking generation of scribes learning and adopting these drawings. The fact that these have survived long enough for us to currently dissect and explore the progression of humour throughout history is truly something remarkable. There is a pleasantness is sharing the humour of sketches produced hundreds of years in the past.
“Medieval manuscript lion illustration” by thegetty is marked with CC0 1.0.