6 ms·
A medieval comedy act has been discovered in first-ever find, researcher says
- Apocryphon 3y agoWhat if the killer rabbit bit proves this is a tongue-in-cheek modern forgery
- heywhatupboys 3y agoIN BRITAIN! I think some of the posts on here are very anglo-centric. I like that HN is a place that serves no one particlar nation or people.
- andrewxdiamond 3y agoAs a noob asking from a place of curiosity, does “Medieval” mean anything outside of the Europe sphere of influence? Medieval evokes a certain imagery in my mind, rather than a time period. It feels weird and Eurocentric to refer to Asian countries in ~1200 as “Medieval” for example.
- senkora 3y agoThe general term is the Post-classical Era. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-classical_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-classical_history
- nemo 3y ago"Medieval" can sometimes be applied to places like China or India, but it's not used that way by historians. In general historians don't use the terms "Medieval" or "Dark Ages" much anymore, and if they do it's with qualifiers. For Europe "Post-Classical," "Early Middle Ages" or "Late Antiquity" are more often used refer to the earlier Middle Ages.
- Vt71fcAqt7 3y ago"Medieval" is certainly still used.[0] "Dark Age" is no longer used interchangeably with Medieval, however. This is because many now see the period starting from the High Middle Ages in Europe as directly leading to the modern period. Refering to the entire Medieval period as a Dark Age is to take a side in that argument. [0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Medieval&scisbd=1 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Medieval&scisbd=1
- eesmith 3y agoWhen this came up a couple week ago, I found examples of people using "medieval Arabic", "Medieval Africa", and even more specifically "Medieval Somalia". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984909 for links. These are used in modern scholarly writing, like "The Medieval Archaeology of Somaliland" from 2002 at https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.566 https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.566 and "China in medieval Indian imagination: “China”-inspired images in medieval South Asia" from 2021 at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591421000176 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591421000176 . However, as others have commented, just because people do use them isn't enough to say if that's the primary form to refer to that period of time.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jahewson 3y agoMedieval refers to a specific European time period, I’m not sure what you expected. > Minstrels were fixtures of European life in the Middle Ages, but though countless references to these entertainers exist in literature from this era, no clear records of an actual minstrel’s “repertoire,” meaning their act or set, has been identified—until now. What’s not to like?
- anthk 3y agoAlso most of Europe had similar jokes both from books and trovadours.
- moffkalast 3y agoHe wrote, in French.
- soneca 3y agoI was expecting to read the text. :(
- ilyt 3y agoIt's vice, any expectation is too high for them
- stronglikedan 3y agoEven solvency, apparently.
- coldpie 3y agoSome better information in this article: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/23557334.library-scotland-manuscript-first-recording-stand-up-comedy/ https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/23557334.librar... The manuscript itself seems to be available here: https://digital.nls.uk/early-manuscripts/browse/archive/133680060 https://digital.nls.uk/early-manuscripts/browse/archive/1336... I freely admit I cannot read it :)
- lstamour 3y agoInteresting. The table of contents is rewritten in modern cursive, though I can't read everything even there. Contents The Hunttinge of the Hare. A Mock Sermon. ... From there we can flip forward to the actual content and ... yep, can't read it. Honestly the only reason I know it says "huntinge of the hare" centred at the top is because I read it in the table of contents. I can tell it's English, but that's about all I can tell, and that only because I can read some of the words, but not all of them. :) Maybe I can send the image to GPT-4 for transcription and translation. (lol)
- Izkata 3y agoLooks like a Gothic font with spelling differences, I think the first line translated is something like: > (something) tale I will now tell Except the spelling is like: > (something) take y wyll yow tell I can also read what seems to be "me to blame" on the 6th line.
- greenhearth 3y agoThis is no surprise. There's a lot of Monty Python style in Shakespeare, and he was definitely influenced by earlier sources, such as medieval morality plays, etc.
- dsr_ 3y agoPerhaps we should say that Monty Python draws on Shakespearean comedy, given the relative times and the fact that we know that most, if not all of the Pythons studied Shxpr.
- moffkalast 3y agoIt was clearly Shakespeare who got the inspiration for his plays from Monty Python sketches. After all they're timeless.
- geocrasher 3y agoAnd thus it was proved true that an artists value isn't known until they are dead. In this case, it took six centuries for somebody to get their jokes. and for those who don't get *my* humor, it's a play on words about 'getting' jokes, physically, in written form
- drewcoo 3y agoIn medieval England people joked about killer rabbits. Must be a direct ancestor of Monty Python's rabbit - connection! In medieval England there was a sketch about "Robin Hood, jousting bears, and partying pigs" yet there's no mention of Walt Disney. I'd say it's a load of hogwash but I'm sure somewhere Becky Ferreira has written about how medieval Britons used to bathe their swine.
- eesmith 3y agoNeat. Wikipedia even lists some of the antecedents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog#Antecedents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog#Anteceden... , including specifically "The idea for the rabbit in the movie was taken from the façade of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris."
- PcChip 3y agois there a link to the actual manuscript?
- a_shoeboy 3y agoHere's the Hunting of the Hare (starts on the page marked 113 and it's in Middle English, but there's a glossary after): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236869902_'The_Hunting_of_the_Hare'_in_the_Heege_Manuscript https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236869902_'The_Hunt...
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago[flagged]
- meepmorp 3y agoPlease don’t.
- hungryhungryhun 3y agoIf you want to make racist jokes or not see the new kids movie with the native american lead, just do so.
- rippercushions 3y agoWhere do you see the previous poster bring racist? If anything, he is being anti-racist by calling out the structural inequity of medieval society.
- mongol 3y agoGot me thinking... what is the oldest, preserved joke? Is it still funny?
- krapp 3y agoThe oldest recorded joke[0], as recorded on a Sumerian tablet somewhere between 1900 and 2300 BC: Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart on her husband’s lap. [0]https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/oldest-known-joke/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/oldest-know...
- anyfoo 3y agoAn intellectual was told by someone: “your beard is now coming in.” So he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual asked what he was doing. Once he heard the whole story, he said: “I’m not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it’s not coming in by the other gate?” Most of them suck by today's standards, but that one is genuinely still funny today!
- nunuvit 3y ago> A student dunce went swimming and almost drowned. So now he swears he’ll never get into water until he’s really learned to swim. This one is funny and deep at the same time.
- annoyingnoob 3y agohttps://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/04/24/earliest-gag/ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/04/24/earliest-gag/
- astrange 3y agohttps://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p77 https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p... 73-75. A dog entered a tavern and said: "I can't see a thing. I'll open this one!" It's not, but probably because this is a mistranslation.
- baerrie 3y agoI saw a medieval comedy with a killer rabbit when i was a kid…by some troupe known as “Monty Python”
- JellyBeanThief 3y agoThat film is stuffed full of jokes about British history. People wanting more might like to pick up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That
- vr46 3y agoHere I am thinking, "but we already know about Jim Davidson and Andrew Dice Clay"
- RugnirViking 3y agoI feel for the poor researcher that wrote "Until then, Heege’s work survives as a “vestige of medieval life lived vibrantly: the good times being as good as they ever have been, and probably ever will,” according to the study." They so want to live in medival times bless them