Introduction:Humour And History

What is humor? In the title of this book we use it as the most general and neutral notion available to cover a whole variety of behaviour: from apophthegms to spoonerisms, practical jokes to puns, farce to foolery. In other words, we see humour as any message - transmitted in action, speech, writing, images or music - intended to produce a smile or a laugh. This definition allows us not only to extend our investigations to antiquity, the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period, but also to pose questions of interest to cultural historians: who transmits what humour in which way to whom, where and when