The Palgrave Handbook

of Humour, History,
and Methodology
Edited by
Daniel Derrin · Hannah Burrows
The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History,
and Methodology
 Daniel Derrin • Hannah Burrows
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of Humour,
History, and
Methodology
Editors
Daniel Derrin Hannah Burrows
Department of English Studies Department of History
Durham University University of Aberdeen
Durham, UK Aberdeen, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-56645-6 ISBN 978-3-030-56646-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56646-3

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 FOREWORD

This book is a carefully considered and curated study of humour and the past.
Far from being assembled in haste, it has had a long gestation. Given its rich
variety of topics and the expertise involved, that is not surprising—co-ordinating
such a multi-talented team might challenge any editorial team. However,
Daniel Derrin and Hannah Burrows have proved their organisational skill time
and again during this developmental period. Together, they have staged not
one but four collaboratories and panel presentations to explore resources and
possible collaborations, launched and maintained a website (https://humour-
softhepast.wordpress.com/), and administered a research grant to support the
whole. For those authors lucky enough to attend sessions at the University of
Aberdeen in 2015 and 2016, at Trinity College Dublin in 2016 and at Durham
University in 2017, meeting and discussing face to face moved the book for-
ward, providing inspiration, a vital critique and wonderful memories.
The real reason for cautious preparation is neither length nor number of
authors: it is meeting the demands of the methodological challenges that this
book is designed to address. For those who have watched the project from its
inception, therefore, the book forms the end product of extended and deliber-
ate discussion about how best to tackle this serious—if amusing—subject. It is
not at all straightforward to approach texts and practices from times past and
across many different languages and cultures, and to focus upon their nexus
with humour further complicates the task. Humour is largely a modern con-
cept and remains quite ill-defined, even in English-speaking cultures.
Importantly, it is innately ambiguous, a potential trap for the unwary scholar in
any age. Until very recently, cultural historians were loath to include humour
in their remit, even when studying the so-called emotions of the past.
While much has been achieved since the first pioneering conference dedi-
cated to the cultural history of humour, convened in Amsterdam in 1994,
methodologies and terminologies have remained unclear. This is despite the
rapid development of humour studies itself, a field that bridges across many
disciplines, from neuroanatomy and psychology to linguistics and performance

v
vi FOREWORD

art and politics. Indeed, looking back over the last quarter-century, it seems to
me that cultural history and humour studies tended to remain in largely sepa-
rate camps with little intellectual exchange. In 2013, I was invited to contrib-
ute to a University of Cambridge seminar on the history of the emotions,
teaching a section titled ‘Humour and Laughter’. Coming from a humour
studies background, I welcomed the decision to include both terms, but found
it difficult to identify either as an emotion. When I asked my (cultural histo-
rian) colleagues for clarity, they told me they regarded laughter as the emotion,
humour as the cause.
From the stance of humour studies, however, laughter is a multi-valent form
of human behaviour that can signal many things—amusement, certainly, but
also nervous embarrassment, surprise, even antagonistic sarcasm and dispar-
agement. Laughter may be fake, concealing all manner of non-humorous inner
feelings (psychologists term this non-Duchenne laughter, and it induces quite
different feelings in its audience than does true Duchenne laughter). Seen this
way, laughter is not itself an emotion, but can be allied to a very wide range of
emotions, including humour. When allied to humour, then it stands to it as
weeping does to its own possible range of emotions, from grief to joy.
Humour on the other hand cannot be limited to being an emotion. It cer-
tainly can be what Wallace Chafe calls ‘the feeling of non-seriousness’ (The
Importance of Not Being Earnest, 2007) that characterises amusement, but the
word is also used variously to denote the stimulus to being amused or the cre-
ation of a humourist or comedian, and to describe a range of experiences and
responsive behaviour that includes laughter and smiling. It has become a con-
venient umbrella term that sums up a very wide range of humour-related phe-
nomena and, as such, has spread around the world, and has been adopted as a
modernising neologism into languages such as Japanese and Chinese.
But is humour an emotion? The question of whether humour (in the gen-
eral sense) is purely a cognitive or an affective experience has plagued humour
studies from its inception in linguistic studies. Recently, however, neuroanat-
omy (using MRI scans) has convincingly demonstrated that in response to
humour, the human brain activates both cognitive and affective pathways, and
does so in a complex sequence. Distinguished by nanoseconds, several distinct
neural steps occur for a human subject exposed to a humour stimulus: first
comes recognition of something as humorous (i.e. not serious, a kind of recog-
nition of a play-frame), then comes comprehension or decoding (what might
be called ‘getting it’) and finally come the responses to it (possibly including
laughter and smiling). While these steps are sequential, their outcomes are far
from inevitably positive. For example, a humour recipient may recognise that
something is intended as humour—and may even respond to it with signs of
acceptance—but still may not like it nor enjoy the process. By the same token,
enjoyment of the humour does not always require full comprehension, let
alone a grasp of the hidden structures of topic/s, target/s and structural devices
employed, nor possession of the specialist knowledge required for decoding
humour’s incongruities, ambiguities and wordplays. Consciousness of why
 FOREWORD vii

something is funny is not required in order to find it amusing—or only humour

scholars would ever laugh. For many reasons, therefore, it is well-nigh impos-
sible to separate the cognitive and affective elements of humour.
If these complexities exist for present-day humour and laughter, how much
more must they apply to other cultural periods in the past? Many languages
possess their own terms for words relating to humour, including its forms and
purposes, and the social conventions surrounding the use of humour and
laughter vary enormously between cultures and also within cultures, even
today. All this presents formidable barriers preventing an easy application of
contemporary concepts, theories and assumptions about where to find humour
and how to approach it. Rising admirably to the challenge posed by such meth-
odological difficulties, the editors and authors alike have nevertheless managed
here to present a book designed to help others as well as to offer its own
insights.
The book’s structure guides the reader first through issues of theory and
method, and then through case studies capitalising on detailed knowledge of
periods and texts, linking historical material with particular theoretical
approaches. Interestingly for me at least, this illuminates not only the source
material but the general utility of the theory, whether traditional or modern.
Daniel Derrin refers to this as ‘conceptual grafting’, a way to get around some
of the problems that arise when trying to apply in specific historical contexts
typically universalising ‘theories of humour’. As far as I am aware, this is the
first book to adopt such an approach, first discussing the limits of what is pos-
sible in identifying and accessing humour that is located in the past, and then
linking a range of modern theories and techniques to specific texts and their
cultural milieux. As such, I believe it marks an important step forward in con-
structive interchange between humour studies and cultural history, and justifies
the book’s title of ‘Handbook’.
For full measure, the third part of the book puts this approach to a practical
test. Several chapters investigate what happens when an informed application
of theory and expert knowledge is carried into translating and interpreting past
texts and images for modern audiences. Is the humour workable? What are the
difficulties that arise? How do modern audiences respond to the humour? Does
the superficial meaning of the humour only translate, or can its deeper signifi-
cance or worldview pass from its original age to the present?
Throughout the book, the editors have ensured that it deals meticulously
with the past widespread tendency in both humour studies and cultural history
to conflate laughter and humour, reaching for precision in the terms and
descriptions used across all chapters. Authors distinguish between benign and
corrective (malicious) humour—and there is plenty of malice in some of the
texts and interpersonal remarks here analysed! In other places, the humour
considered is benign and uplifting, linked to religious insight. The principal
argument made by all the specialists across their separate fields is that studying
humour in past texts, images and records is rewarding in and of itself, for a
number of reasons.
viii FOREWORD

Firstly, looking for such humour is often a pioneering effort: it is surprising

how often in the past scholars have completely overlooked it. Treating the past
with too much reverence can do it as much disservice as studying it too super-
ficially. Secondly, searching for humour puts our knowledge of the past to the
test, showing how demanding it is to peer at images and passages that look
suspiciously odd and to be confident of one’s interpretation of them as humour.
This is not a task for the faint-hearted. Thirdly, however, the task reminds us
not only of the distance between our own contemporary culture and that of the
past, but also of some of the closeness that exists between the past and the pres-
ent. While today’s comic practices and theoretical approaches of course vary
from those of the past, they also have surprising similarities. Despite the lack of
direct equivalence of terms in many periods and languages, some of the studies
reveal the sense of a shared experience of humour and of being amused. When
we see Erasmus’s Folly recommending laughter as a way of discreetly passing
over tensions between married couples and avoiding divorce, we immediately
recognise the insight. From that early modern world, it is just a step to Harvard
University in the 1930s and the beginnings of personality assessment, when
Gordon Allport chose to include in his instruments a test for sense of humour
as an indicator of maturity and good mental health.
I am proud to recall that the first steps towards this book can be traced to
Australia. The Australasian Humour Studies Network (AHSN), now hosted by
the University of Sydney, was founded on a wave of interest in studying humour
that was generated by the 8th Conference of the International Society for
Humor Studies at the University of New South Wales in 1996. The AHSN has
assembled each year since then to exchange papers and strengthen each other’s
belief that their topics, far from being simple and easy as many colleagues in the
academy suppose, are in fact highly demanding. I and others in Australia and
New Zealand have had the honour of providing a meeting ground for this
group. During some of those events, the editors first explored the possibility of
this project. After that, as they say, the rest is history. It seems only appropriate
that I salute them in this foreword as they encourage exploration of the chal-
lenges involved in appreciating historical humour. It is my belief that their
book will play an important part in assisting the future achievements of humour
scholars.

Sydney, Australia Jessica Milner Davis

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank Jessica Milner Davis for her unfailing support in this endeav-
our from the very beginning. The Arts and Humanities Research Council
(Project Reference: AH/N008987/1) generously funded the Humours of the
Past (HOP) project, which led to this volume and for that we are very grateful.
A grant from the Principal’s Interdisciplinary Fund at the University of
Aberdeen helped us crucially at an early stage. Thanks also to the members of
the HOP project’s steering group who helped us plan and organise
conferences.
Among them, we wish to single out the following individuals to whom we
are sincerely grateful for their help as members of the editorial board for this
volume. Many thanks to each of you for your advice and input.

• Giulia Baccini
• Ron Stewart
• Conal Condren
• Delia Chiaro
• Jessica Milner Davis

ix
 CONTENTS

Part I Preliminaries: Terms and Theories 1

1 Introduction 3
Daniel Derrin

2 The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the Limits of

Method 19
Conal Condren

3 No Sense of Humour? ‘Humour’ Words in Old Norse 43

Hannah Burrows

4 Rewriting Laughter in Early Modern Europe 71

Lucy Rayfield

5 The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-

Century Histories of Emotions 93
Rebecca Tierney-Hynes

6 Bergson’s Theory of the Comic and Its Applicability to

Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy 109
Jessica Milner Davis

7 Comic Character and Counter-Violation: Critiquing Benign

Violation Theory 133
Daniel Derrin

8 Humour and Religion: New Directions? 151

Richard A. Gardner

xi
xii CONTENTS

Part II Case Studies 173

9 Visual Humour on Greek Vases (550–350 BC): Three

Approaches to the Ambivalence of Ugliness in Popular Culture 175
Alexandre G. Mitchell

10 Approaching Jokes and Jestbooks in Premodern China 201

Giulia Baccini

11 Testing the Limits of Pirandello’s Umorismo: A Case Study

Based on Xiaolin Guangji 221
Antonio Leggieri

12 The Monsters That Laugh Back: Humour as a Rhetorical

Apophasis in Medieval Monstrology 239
Rafał Borysławski

13 Medieval Jokes in Serious Contexts: Speaking Humour to

Power 257
Martha Bayless

14 ‘Lightness and Maistrye’: Herod, Humour, and Temptation in

Early English Drama 275
Jamie Beckett

15 Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities 293

Alison Williams

16 Naïve Parody in Rabelais 313

John Parkin

17 ‘By God’s Arse’: Genre, Humour and Religion in William

Wager’s Moral Interludes 325
Lieke Stelling

18 Romantic Irony: Problems of Interpretation in Schlegel and

Carlyle 341
Giles Whiteley

19 Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns in Late-Nineteenth-Century

Japanese Cartoons 361
Ronald Stewart
 CONTENTS xiii

20 Popular Humour in Nordic Jesting Songs of the Nineteenth

and Twentieth Centuries: Danish Recordings of Oral Song
Tradition 383
Lene Halskov Hansen

21 Spanish Flu: The First Modern Case of Viral Humour? 405

Nikita Lobanov

Part III Humour of the Past in the Present 429

22 Translating Humour in The Song of Roland 431

John DuVal

23 Intercultural and Interartistic Transfers of Shandean Humour

in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 443
Yen-Mai Tran-Gervat

24 The Scholars, Chronique indiscrète or Neoficial’naja istorija?

The Challenge of Translating Eighteenth-Century Chinese
Irony and Grotesque for Contemporary Western Audiences 459
Anna Di Toro

25 Putting Humour on Display 481

Laurence Grove

26 Building The Old Joke Archive 499

Bob Nicholson and Mark Hall

Index 515
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Giulia Baccini, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Premodern Chinese literature

and Classical Chinese at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her principal research
interests lie in Early Medieval Chinese literature (220–581 AD), in particular,
non-canonical literary production, entertaining literature and practices
linked to it. She is also interested in the diachronic study of joke-books as
a ‘genre’ in the pre-modern period. Among her publications related to
humour, she has published ‘Forest of Laughter and Traditional Chinese
Jestbooks’, Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (2014) and with Maddalena
Barenghi, ‘The Witty Courtiers, Memoir 66’ (Guji liezhuan), The Grand
Scribe’s Records (2019).
Martha  Bayless is Professor of English and Director of the Folklore and
Public Culture Program at the University of Oregon, USA, where she special-
izes in medieval popular culture, including humour, food, and games. Her
books include Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition, Fifteen Medieval
Latin Parodies, and the forthcoming Humour and Literature in Culture: The
Middle Ages. She also is the editor of A Cultural History of Comedy in the
Middle Ages.
Jamie Beckett is a research impact officer at Coventry University. He holds a
doctorate from Durham University, undertaken as part of the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project ‘Records of Early English
Drama: North East’ within the Department of English Studies. His thesis
sought to complicate preconceptions about the role of laughter in early biblical
performances, considering the vitality of humour and audience response in the
‘mystery plays’ of York and the Towneley MS. With interdisciplinary research
interests in late medieval urban societies, civic performance, visual cultures, and
popular devotion, his publications include articles for Medieval English Theatre
and European Medieval Drama.
Rafał  Borysławski is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Literary
Studies, University of Silesia, Poland. His research focuses chiefly on Old

xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

English literature as well as on the questions of medieval culture associated

with the field of socio-cultural history. He has published a book on the idea of
enigmaticity in Old English literature and numerous papers discussing Old
English philosophical and cultural outlooks, Middle English romances and
fabliaux, and medieval visual culture.
Hannah Burrows is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University
of Aberdeen. Her research interests range widely across Old Norse literature
and culture. She has edited and translated the Old Norse riddle corpus for the
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages series, and her publica-
tions include articles on the relationship between the riddles and Norse
mythological poetry.
Conal  Condren is an Emeritus Scientia Professor at the University of New
South Wales and honorary professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the
Humanities, University of Queensland. He is a Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences in Australia. He is
a member of both Clare Hall and Churchill College, Cambridge. His
main research interests are in intellectual history, historical semantics and
method, specifically focused on early modern Europe. Among his books
are The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts (1985), Argument and Authority
in Early Modern England (2006), Hobbes, The Scriblerians and the History of
Philosophy (2011), and Political Vocabularies (2017). He is working on a
volume of essays on the study of humour.
Jessica Milner Davis, PhD, FRSN, is a member of Clare Hall, Cambridge; a
research associate at the University of Sydney and at Brunel University London’s
Centre for Comedy Studies Research; and co-ordinates the Australasian
Humour Studies Network (AHSN). She is a past president of the International
Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) and in 2018 received the ISHS
Lifetime Achievement Award for her interdisciplinary research and publi-
cations on humour and laughter.
Daniel Derrin is an honorary research fellow in the Department of English
Studies at Durham University. Prior to research and teaching fellowships at
Durham, he was the S.  Ernest Sprott Fellow for 2014–2015 (University of
Melbourne), and an Associate Investigator for the Australian Research
Council’s Centre for the History of Emotions (2013–2015). He is the
author of Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne (2013)
and of Humour and Renaissance Culture: 1500–1660 (forthcoming, 2022),
as well as co-editor with A.D.  Cousins of Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in
Early Modern English Drama (2018) and of Alexander Pope in the Reign of
Queen Anne: Reconsiderations of His Early Career (2020).
Anna Di Toro studied Chinese and Russian language and literature in Beijing
and Moscow and obtained her PhD in Rome. She teaches Chinese Language
and Literature at Università per Stranieri di Siena. Her research is centred
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

on Sino-Russian cultural relations, European sinology, and translation of

Chinese literature. Among her publications are La percezione della Russia in
Cina tra XVII e XVIII sec., Roma, Nuova Cultura, 2012; Wang Zhenhe,
Rosa Rosa amore mio (adaptation, notes and Introduction by A.  Di Toro),
Roma, Orientalia, 2014; ‘Antonio Montucci e la sinologia europea tra
‘700 e ‘800’, in Di padre in figlio. Antonio ed Enrico Montucci senesi europei,
ed. by D.  Cherubini, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2018, pp.  19–40; ‘The
Kitajskaja grammatika (1835) and Bičurin’s ideas on the “mechanism” of
Chinese between European and Chinese grammatical traditions’, HEL,
2019, pp.  57–77. She is working on an Italian translation of the Qing
novel Rulin waishi.
John  DuVal, a holder of the James E. and Ellen Wadley Roper Chair of
Creative Writing/Translation, 2014 through 2018, and Professor of English
and Literary Translation at the University of Arkansas, has published 13 books
so far. He received a National Endowment for the Arts award for his translation
of the thirteenth-century French verse play, Greenwood Follies, and two awards
from the Academy of American Poets for his translations of twentieth-century
Romanesco poetry (the Harold Morton Landon Award for his translation of
Cesare Pascarella’s The Discovery of America; and the Raiziss/de Palchi Award
in Translation for his Tales of Trilussa). His latest books are Interpreting a
Continent: Voices of Colonial America, co-authored with his daughter Kathleen;
The Song of Roland, which was a finalist for the PEN-USA Award in Literary
Translation; and Esteban: Sixteenth-Century African Explorer of North America,
co-authored with Kathleen DuVal (forthcoming, 2021).
Richard A. Gardner is an Emeritus Professor at Sophia University in Tokyo
where he taught religion and comparative culture, was Dean of the Faculty of
Liberal Arts, and served as the co-editor of Monumenta Nipponica. Among the
topics he has published on are the reaction to Aum Shinrikyô, Japanese noh
theater, and religion and humour. He also served as the editor of the Japanese
translation of Lauren Artress’ Walking a Sacred Path and edited Between
Religion and the Study of Religion: Towards New Forms of Human Community,
a book that has appeared only in Japanese and is centered on introducing
the thought of the historian of religion Charles H.  Long to a wider
audience.
Laurence Grove is Professor of French and Text/Image Studies and Director
of the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the
University of Glasgow. His research focuses on historical aspects of text/
image forms, and in particular bande dessinée. He is President of the
International Bande Dessinée Society. Grove (also known as Billy) has
authored (in full, jointly or as editor) 12 books, including Comics in French
(Berghahn, 2010 and 2013) and approximately 60 chapters or articles.
He co-curated the Comic Invention exhibition (The Hunterian, Glasgow,
2016; Clydebank Museum, 2017) and Frank Quitely: The Art of Comics
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

(Kelvingrove, Glasgow, 2017) and has long-term hopes of seeing a

National Comics Centre for Scotland.
Mark  Hall is Lecturer in Computing and Communications at the Open
University in the UK. His primary research focus is on improving access to our
cultural heritage through digital means, in particular for non-expert users. He
has an established track-record developing web-based digital humanities appli-
cations, covering a variety of aspects such as digitising medieval documents,
exploring digital museum collections online, and transcribing and annotating
text. He leads the development of the Old Joke Archive—the world’s first
purpose-built digital repository of historical jests.
Lene Halskov Hansen is an archivist and researcher at the Danish Folklore
Archives, the Royal Danish Library. Her research explores traditional Danish/
Nordic ballads, song performance, the use and meaning of songs and singing,
humour, chain dance, and folk music movements in the 1970s–1980s. Among
her publications in those areas are Ballader og kædedans. To perspektiver på
dansk folkevisekultur (Ballads and chain dance. Two aspects of Danish folk song
culture), Copenhagen, 2015, and ‘Ironi og forvirring i 1800-tallet’ (Irony
and confusion in the nineteenth Century). In En aldeles egen och förträfflig
National-Musik, ed. by Märta Ramsten and Gunnar Ternhag, Uppsala,
2015. She is a member of the Nordic research network for vocal folk
music (NoFoVoFo).
Antonio Leggieri is a PhD candidate in Chinese Literature at the University
of Salento, in co-supervisorship with the University of Vienna. He has a back-
ground in translation and interpreting, two professions that he still pursues
alongside academic research. He lived in Beijing from 2012 to 2016, where he
first came into contact with the jokes that he presents in this volume. His inter-
ests include comparative literature and comparative poetics, late-imperial
Chinese literature (in particular, jestbooks, narrative, and drama), Chinese/
Italian translation and translation history. His articles in English, Italian, and
Chinese have appeared in influential journals, and he has translated two collec-
tions of Chinese short stories into Italian, which were published in 2018 and
2019, respectively. He is based in Taiwan, where he first came for a short
research visit at National Taiwan University and ended up staying because of
the Covid-19 pandemic.
Nikita Lobanov is a PhD candidate in the Department of Interpreting and
Translation at the University of Bologna, Forlì. His research is focused on the
use of humour online by the radical right movements in the UK following the
Brexit referendum, the evolution of memes as units of culture throughout
time, and the link with hate crimes that occur on the ground. He has
presented papers on humour at several international conferences, most
recently, for example, at the International Congress on Verbal Humor,
Universidad de Alicante, 2019.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

Alexandre  G.  Mitchell (D.Phil Oxon 2002) is the director of Expressum

(https://www.expressum.eu), a Brussels-based translation company specialis-
ing in scientific translation (antiquity and medieval fields) from French to
English. He is a scientific collaborator at the University of Fribourg. Greek Vase
Painting and the Origins of Visual Humour (2009, 2012, and 2013) is an
essential book in the study of visual humour. He writes in the fields of Greek
vase painting, the history of medicine, and the reception of antiquity (https://
www.alexmitchell.net).
Bob Nicholson is a Reader in History and Digital Humanities at Edge Hill
University in the UK. He works on the history of nineteenth-century popular
culture, with a particular focus on periodicals, comedy, sport, gender, transat-
lantic relations, and digital archives. His research project explores cultures of
joke telling in Victorian Britain. Alongside Mark Hall, he curates and
leads the development of The Old Joke Archive—the world’s first purpose-
built digital repository of historical jests.
John Parkin is Emeritus Professor of French Literary Studies at University of
Bristol, where he taught French literature and language for 39 years having
previously studied at the universities of Oxford and Glasgow. He has written
books on Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Henry Miller, as well as inves-
tigated various aspects of the theory and practice of humour. He now lives in
Bristol in retirement with Eileen, his wife of 48 years.
Lucy Rayfield is a Research Associate in French at St Benet’s Hall, University
of Oxford, and Lecturer in Modern Languages (French and Italian) at the
University of Bristol. From 2019 to 2020 she was the Modern Humanities
Research Association (MHRA) Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of
the Renaissance, University of Warwick. Rayfield is the author of Poetics,
Performance and Politics in French and Italian Renaissance Comedy (2021)
and has written articles and chapters on poetics, festival culture, and rivalry in
early modern France and Italy. Her new research project concerns the role of
Italian propaganda in the French Wars of Religion, with a particular focus on
satirical, subversive, and multilingual responses to the conflict.
Lieke Stelling is Assistant Professor of English at Utrecht University. She is
the author of Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama (2019),
which was shortlisted for the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2020, and
coeditor of The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in
Early Modern Art and Literature (2012). Other publications include ‘Recent
Studies in Religious Conversion’ (English Literary Renaissance, 2017) and
‘“Leaving Their Humours to the Word Mongers of Mallice”: Mocking Polemic
in Tarltons Newes Out of Purgatorie (1590) and Two Contemporary Responses’
(Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 2018). Her book-length project, Faith in Jest, is on
humour and religion in the literature of the English Reformation.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ronald  Stewart teaches in the Department of Sociology of Daito Bunka

University, Japan. He has published his research work on political cartoons and
Japanese manga history in both English and Japanese. Stewart’s most recent
paper in English, co-authored with Khin Wee Chen and Robert Phiddian, is
the chapter ‘Towards a Discipline of Political Cartoon Studies: Mapping the
Field’ in Satire and Politics: The Interplay of Heritage and Practice (Palgrave,
2017). He planned, co-curated, and translated the Japanese political car-
toon exhibition, The Other Manga: It Bites, held at RMIT University in
2019. Stewart serves on the board of the Japan Society for Studies in
Cartoons and Comics and is the review editor for their journal Manga
Kenkyū. He also sits on the board of Saitama Municipal Cartoon Museum’s
Kitazawa Rakuten Society devoted to Japan’s first career cartoonist.
Rebecca  Tierney-Hynes is a lecturer in the Department of English at the
University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Novel Minds: Philosophers and
Romance Readers, 1680–1740 (2012) and articles on eighteenth-century nov-
els in ECS, SEL and The Eighteenth Century. Her work on comedy is funded by
a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Recent or forthcoming articles on
eighteenth-century drama and on political celebrity include essays in SECC,
Textual Practice, and Genre, and essays for the collections Intimacy and
Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Making Stars: Biography and
Eighteenth-Century Celebrity.
Yen-Mai  Tran-Gervat is Senior Lecturer (Maître de conférences) in
Comparative Literature at Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris). Her research
in humour focuses on Early Modern European literature (England, France,
and Spain): parody, burlesque, and comic fiction in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries; translations and adaptations of early modern humorous works
in later periods; early theories of humour. She is a member of the International
Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) and of the Humours of the Past
(HOP) network. She chairs the French society for humour studies called
Réseau Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur l’Humour (RIRH), which
she co-founded in 2017.
Giles  Whiteley is Associate Professor of English Literature at Stockholm
University. He has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and is the
author of four monographs, most recently The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-
Century Literature, 1843–1907 (2020). His projects include editing Walter
Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean for Oxford University Press and writ-
ing a monograph on humour and culture in the nineteenth century for
Routledge.
Alison Williams is Associate Professor of French at Swansea University. She
has published on medieval and Renaissance literature, including articles and
book chapters on Le Roman de Renart, Fouke le FitzWaryn, and Rabelais, and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi

a monograph on tricksters and pranksters in French and German pre-modern

literature (2000). She has a particular interest in the interdisciplinary
medical humanities and has presented several conference papers on the
connection of medieval and Renaissance literature to the field, including
papers on Marie de France and Rabelais.