The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology

Part I: Preliminaries: terms and theories

1.Introduction - Daniel Derrin2.The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the limits of Method- Conal Condren3.No Sense of Humour? 'Humour' Words in Old Norse- Hannah Burrows 4.Rewriting Laughter in Early Modern Europe- Lucy Rayfield5.The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions- Rebecca Tierney-Hynes 6.Bergson's Theory of the Comic and its Applicability to Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy- Jessica Milner Davis 7.Comic Character and Counter-violation: Critiquing Benign Violation Theory- Daniel Derrin 8.Humour and Religion: New Directions?- Richard A. Gardner 
Part II: Case studies
9.Visual Humour on Greek Vases (550-350 BC): Three Approaches to the Ambivalence of Ugliness in Popular Culture- Alexandre Mitchell 10. Approaching Jokes and Jestbooks in Premodern China- Giulia Baccini 11.Testing the Limits of Pirandello's Umorismo: a Case Study Based on Xiaolin Guangji- Antonio Leggieri 12.The Monsters that Laugh Back: Humour as a Rhetorical Apophasis in Medieval Monstrology- Rafal Boryslawski 13.Medieval Jokes in Serious Contexts: Speaking Humour to Power- Martha Bayless 14. 'Lightness and Maistrye': Herod, Humour and Temptation in Early English Drama- Jamie Beckett15.Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities- Alison Williams16.Naïve Parody in Rabelais- John Parkin17.'By God's Arse': Genre, Humour and Religion in William Wager's Moral Interludes- Lieke Stelling18.Romantic Irony: Problems of Interpretation in Schlegel and Carlyle- Giles Whiteley 19.Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japanese Cartoons- Ronald Stewart 20.Popular Humour in Nordic Jesting Songs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Danish Recordings of Oral Song Tradition- Lene Halskov Hansen 21.Spanish Flu: The First Modern Case of Viral Humour?- Nikita Lobanov 

Part III: Humour of the Past in the

Daniel Derrin is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. He has held research and teaching fellowships in Australia and the UK and has published widely on early modern literature and on humour.
Hannah Burrows is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has edited and translated the Old Norse riddle corpus for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages series, and her publications include articles on the relationship between the riddles and Norse mythological poetry.