Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Illustrations viii
4. Acknowledgements ix
5. I The Set Up
6. Introduction: Laughing at, with and in the Middle Ages 1
7. 1 The Cervantean Paradigm: Comedy, Madness and Meta-Medievalism in Don Quixote 23
8. II Oldies But Goodies: Comic Recovery
9. 2 Scraping the Rust from the Joking Bard: Chaucer in the Age of Wit 43
10. 3 Medievalist Farce as Anti-Totalitarian Weapon: Dario Fo as Modern Giullare 68
11. III Hit and Myth: Performing and Parodying Medievalism
12. 4 Pre-Modern Camp and Faerie Legshows: Travestying the Middle Ages on the Nineteenth-Century Stage 91
13. 5 Up the Middle Ages: Performing Tradition in Comic Medievalist Cinema 112
14. IV That’s Edutainment: Comedy and History
15. 6 ‘The Past is a Different and Fairly Disgusting Country’: The Middle Ages 139 in Recent British ‘Jocumentary’ 139
16. 7 Smelling the Past: Medieval Heritage Tourism and the Phenomenology of Ironic Nostalgia 161
17. Afterword: Laughing into the Future 181
18. Bibliography 185
19. Index 201