Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century 0198843542, 9780198843542

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Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century

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Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century P E T E R  J.  A .  J O N E S

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Peter J. A. Jones 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937241 ISBN 978–0–19–884354–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Kevyn Rhys Jones (1953–2015) Rex ridens

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Acknowledgments While writing this book I had to move around a lot, and I often thought about quitting the project or giving up on the Middle Ages altogether. But the encouragement, support, and love of many people kept bringing me back. First and foremost, I would like to thank Brigitte Bedos-Rezak at New York University. It would be impossible to imagine a better PhD advisor than Brigitte, whose guidance, patience, and care allowed me to develop a project that I was ready to give my heart to. Brigitte cannot take responsibility for any of my ­mistakes — those are all my own fault. But without her inspiration and support none of this research would have been possible. In New York, I was also very lucky to receive guidance from Maryanne Kowaleski at Fordham University. Her introduction to resources, her good advice, and her writing coaching were extremely valuable in getting this project started. It was also a privilege to study at the IFA under Jonathan Alexander, whose suggestions were crucial in the early stages of my research. Both Michael Stoller and Fiona Griffiths offered me help at points when I had almost lost the thread of what I was doing, as did Kostis Smyrlis at NYU. Jay Diehl, Jessica Sechrist, Youn Jong Lee, Mike Peixoto, and James Robertson were all supportive as my research began. Most especially, I would like to thank William Jordan at Princeton, who took a great deal of time coaching me through some of the essentials of twelfth-century politics. He has offered feedback on this work at many points throughout the writing process, and I am very grateful for his continuing support and kindness. In London, I received advice in the initial stages of my writing from Miles Taylor, Jonathan Waterlow, John Gillingham, Michael Clanchy, and Suzanne Reynolds. John Arnold provided me with feedback on an early draft of one of the chapters of this book, and I want to thank him and Tom Johnson for taking time to get me oriented in the London medievalist community. Gary Slapper was a wonderful host while I was a fellow at NYU London in 2013, and his enthusiasm for the project was uplifting. In Norwich, Nick Vincent was generous in helping me get started, and I want to thank him especially for providing me with many materials that I would otherwise never have found. In Toronto, I was very lucky to develop much of this research as a fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute from 2014 to 2016. Bob Gibbs and Kim Yates created an ideal work environment, and provided care and support as I encountered a number of difficulties. Many of the ideas for this book grew in the institute’s seminars on “Humour, Play, and Games,” and I am especially grateful to Matt Cohn, Maggie Hennefeld, Katie Price, Simon Dickie, Jeanne Mathieu-Lessard, and

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viii Acknowledgments Oisin Keohane for helping me to see new sides of the topic. I am also thankful to Isabelle Cochelin and Michael Meyerson, from the university’s history department, for their advice and mentorship. In Providence, I am thankful for the support of Suzanne Stewart Steinberg and Donna Goodnow, who helped me while I was a visiting scholar at the Pembroke Center at Brown University from 2016 to 2017. Within the university’s history department, I would also like to thank Amy Remensnyder for taking time to discuss my research. I am especially grateful, also, for the kind help of Pinar Kemerli and Simon Gilhooley. In Dublin, I would like to thank Kevin Whelan, Eimear Clowry Delaney, and everyone at the Notre Dame Keough-Naughton Center for letting me take part in their wonderful yearly seminars. Further afield in Tullow, my thanks to Margaret Mulhall for giving me the fortification to see the project through. In Tyumen, I am indebted to Andrey Shcherbenok and all of the staff and scholars at the School of Advanced Studies. The SAS is a unique scholarly community, and the classes and events at the school have been motivational. Evgeny Grishin and duskin drum were especially supportive as I developed my thoughts in an open lecture series. I would also like to give huge thanks to Valeria Savina, for helping our family make a home in the city, and Gulyusa Zinnat, for being such an amazing friend. Back in England, I am very grateful for the help of Bill Sherman, Charles Burnett, Alessandro Scaffi, and Eva Miller at the Warburg Institute. Michelle O’Malley was extremely kind in accommodating my family situation when I joined the institute as a Long Term Fellow, and gave me the sort of support that distinguishes the Warburg as such a special place to be. At University College London, David d’Avray was a friendly office neighbor, and gave me guidance as I completed the manuscript. I am also grateful to John Sabapathy and Sophie Page, who were very kind in welcoming me as a colleague. My studies began at the University of Bristol, and ultimately I want to thank Anke Holdenried and Ian Wei for the teaching that set me on the path of medieval history in the first place. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family. Todd Foley and Sharon Ostfeld-Johns have offered incredible support, advice, and friendship over the years of this book’s development. Nothing would have been possible without the love of my mother Kim Clark, my brother Mike Jones, my partner Anne Mulhall, and our daughter Frida Jones. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Kevyn Jones, who sadly did not live to sell the book in his shop. Although I will never understand laughter, anything I know about it I learned from him.

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Contents Abbreviations

Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe

xi

1

1. The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200 17 Theology19 The Monasteries 25 Satire37 Philosophy42 Rhetoric48 Medical Literature 51 2. Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative Risus Mysticus: The Laughing Prophecies of Edward the Confessor (d.1066) Risus Blasphemus: The Sudden Death of William II (d.1100) Risus Regalis: William Rufus Redacted and Revised

57 60 69 76

3. Laughter and Power at Henry II’s Court Cultivating a Sense of Humor Laughter as a Political Weapon “Through Laughing, Telling the Truth”

86 91 102 111

4. Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint Becket’s Life and Transformation Saint Thomas’s Afterlife Becket as a Type of Laughing Saint

121 123 128 138

5. Henry II, the Laughing King The King’s Sovereign Laughter The King’s Supernatural Laughter The King’s Two Laughs

145 150 169 175

Conclusion: Between Laughing Saint and Laughing King

179

Appendix: Henry’s Courtiers 183 Bibliography187 General Index209

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Abbreviations Acta Sanctorum Becket Correspondence

Becket Materials

BL BN CCCM Gerald of Wales, Opera PL

J.  Bollandus and G.  Henschenius, Acta Sanctorum . . . editio novissima, edited by J. Carnandet et al. (Paris: Palmé, etc., 1863–). The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1162–1170, edited and translated by Anne  J.  Duggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, edited by James Craigie Robertson, and J.  B. Sheppard, 7 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1875–85). British Library Bibliothèque Nationale Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis. Giraldus Cambrensis, Opera, edited by J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner, 8 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1861–91). Patrologiae cursus completus: series latina, edited by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1844–64).

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Introduction Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe

Laughter played a surprising role in the twelfth-century European imagination. Around the middle of the 1100s, chronicles began telling stories of dead children being resurrected while laughing. Histories described men being struck dumb for making blasphemous jokes, and hagiographies showed saints and kings laughing while predicting the future. At the very same moment, laughter became an important topic of philosophical, theological, and political debate. By the final decades of the twelfth century it was appearing as the principal subject of monastic treatises, miracle collections, and biblical glosses. Just as theologians at Oxford and Paris were now debating whether Jesus laughed, philosophers were beginning to define laughter as a property of the human, and writers at the great medical schools of Salerno and Montpellier were diagnosing laughter as a healing power within the body. Nowhere was the importance of laughter more hotly debated than in England, at the court of King Henry II (r.1154–89). Here, within the works of a dazzling literary renaissance, two startling figures appeared: a “laughing king” (rex ridens) and a “laughing saint” (sanctus ridens). King Henry II is perhaps most famous now for his bureaucratic legal reforms. But contemporary observers felt that laughter was just as essential as bureaucracy in the running of his government. Whether he was intervening in justice or arguing with his functionaries, we are told that Henry often preferred joking as his first line of attack. Among his critics he was famous for creating a “public spectacle of derision” (publice derisionis theatrum), inspiring joking and mockery as tools of political manipulation.1 As experienced insiders warned newcomers, when entering Henry’s court they should beware “laughter and the disgrace of failure” (risu aut ruinae turpiter), which could cost them their careers or even their lives.2 According to high ranking courtiers such as the bishops Roger of Worcester (d. 1179) and Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200), joking with the king was often the most effective way of deflating his anger and winning his support. Meanwhile Daniel of Beccles (d.c.1206), a courtier who wrote an

1  Peter of Blois, The Later Letters of Peter of Blois, edited by Elizabeth Revell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), letter 7, p. 43. 2 John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury, edited by W.  J.  Millor, H.  E.  Butler, and Christopher N. L. Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), vol. 2, Letter 176, pp. 166–7.

Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century. Peter Jones, Oxford University Press (2019). © Peter J. A. Jones. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001

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2  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century extensive conduct manual advising on good manners, claimed that everything he knew of wit (facete) he had learned “from Old King Henry himself.”3 From the same circles that produced this “laughing king” also emerged the ­figure of Thomas Becket (c. 1120–70), who writers quickly immortalized after his death as a type of “laughing saint.” Thomas had been the king’s closest intimate and Royal Chancellor, and by all accounts he was a frivolous joker in his early political life. But his career took an abrupt turn in 1162, when Henry made him archbishop of Canterbury, the highest rank in the English church. In his new post Thomas began demanding expanded ecclesiastical powers over law and taxation, at which point his relations with Henry cooled sharply. The two men burst into open war, and Thomas fled to France in exile in 1164, apparently fearing for his life. He was assassinated in Canterbury Cathedral shortly after Christmas in 1170, reportedly at the king’s will, and was canonized just three years later. A collection of hagiographies soon followed, many of which singled out Thomas’s laughter as a symbol of his defiance. In these texts Thomas was shown laughing while receiving prophecies, joking while attacking the king, and even laughing while preparing for his death. In one particularly graphic account, a French poet described Thomas’s mutilated severed head laughing back in mockery at his aggressors. And a popular folklore even sprang up, celebrating Thomas for performing a range of “amusing miracles” and miraculous jokes from beyond the grave. Why did laughter become so important in the second half of the twelfth century? And how did contemporaries imagine it working as an attribute of both kingship and sainthood? By investigating these two connected questions as they played out at the English court, this book aims to expose the powerful role of laughter in medieval political and religious life more generally. Ultimately, I will argue that the popularity of images of the laughing Saint Thomas and King Henry rested on two crucial international developments. First, they reflected laughter’s growing reputation as a sign of transcendent moral authority within wider networks of European theology, literature, and social culture. During this period, I will suggest, descriptions of inspired laughter increasingly worked to communicate God’s emphatic and unequivocal support. More practically, I will also argue that the success of the laughing king and saint was a measure of the increasing value of humor as a political technique for maintaining and negotiating power. As we will see, however, these theoretical and practical capacities crossed over in a number of curious ways. Just as Saint Thomas’s laughter became an imaginative symbol of holy supremacy in his clash with royal power, so theological ideas of moral laughter also came to be mobilized as practical justifications for the satirical and politicized laughter of Henry’s courtiers. What made the laughter of Henry and Thomas so powerful for contemporaries, I will ultimately suggest, was that it managed to be inextricably political and theological in its impact, all at once. 3 Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus Magnus Daniel Becclesiensis, edited by J.  Gilbart Smyly (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1939), p. 92, l.2836–9.

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Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe  3 While international in scope, this book will focus on an exceptional English court society. After the country had suffered nearly twenty years of anarchy and civil war, Henry Plantagenet came to the throne in 1154 keen to bring order and stability to his new realm. He ended up bringing a cultural renaissance as well. Among King Henry’s intimates were some of the most talented and creative Latin writers of the Middle Ages. John of Salisbury (d.1180), an experienced administrator and heavyweight intellectual, was a leading light of twelfth-century learning, writing political tracts, poems, and candid chronicles, all saturated with allusions to classical literature and philosophy. Peter of Blois (d.c.1203), a talented diplomat and paranoid nomad who worked for Henry after years of study in Paris and Bologna, produced a collection of letters that are still celebrated as some of the finest in the Latin language. Walter Map (d.c.1209/10), a satirist and raconteur, worked closely with the king and left an exuberant account of his life at court that compared the place to Hell itself. Gerald of Wales (d.c.1223), an ambitious and frustrated archdeacon, served the king closely and reflected bitterly on his experiences across a range of historical, autobiographical, and anthropological texts. Each of these courtiers, alongside many others who we will hear from throughout this book, immortalized the fiercely competitive environment of Henry’s court. Yet they all also went out of their way to stress the importance of humor. Not only did these courtiers produce a wave of popular satirical works, they also participated in unprecedented debates about laughter’s ethics, and they circulated conduct manuals, such as those written by Étienne de Fougères (d.1178) and Daniel of Beccles, that paid obsessive attention to humor and wit as matters of courtly virtue. Yet these writers also need to be appreciated within wider continental networks of ideas. On the one hand, the turn to laughter at Henry’s court is exemplary of the “twelfth-century renaissance” that was then gripping Europe. As enthusiasm for copying and circulating ancient texts and ideas increased, works such as Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, Cicero’s De officiis, and the Satires of both Horace and Juvenal began to have a noticeable impact on ways of seeing humor.4 New commentaries on classical comic texts emerged in the schools of Paris, and philosophers increasingly engaged with interpretations of laughter in the works of Aristotle, Quintilian, and Seneca.5 Yet twelfth-century writers were equally enthusiastic about reaching across spatial boundaries. Courtiers such as John of Salisbury and Gerald of Wales participated in an increasingly federal international culture, drawing on a broad web of theological debates from Paris, monastic sermons from Burgundy, and rhetorical treatises from Italy, as well as saint’s lives from Flanders and love poems from Toulouse. Rather than articulating a totally 4 See for example Suzanne Reynolds, “Glossing Horace: Using the Classics in the Medieval Classroom,” in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, edited by Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith (London: Red Gull Press, 1996), pp. 109–10, pp. 103–18. 5  James Jerome Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 89–132.

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4  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century original view of humor, they processed and intensified these continental and ­classical attitudes in response to their own highly unique political situation. Focusing on laughter as a political technique, this book hopes to contribute to  our understanding of a deeply transformative period in the development of England. Henry II’s reign (1154–89) was a time of unprecedented political centralization. As Henry strove to reform his government, a string of written protocols, letters, and charters came to replace the forms of personal and charismatic authority that had previously stood in their place.6 In the law the development of original writs brought wider and more uniform access to justice, while economic practices in the Exchequer became codified and scrupulously preserved in ­archival records.7 At this time England also experienced a transformation of religious practices. Cistercian monasteries sprang up throughout the English countryside, electrifying a new generation of young people with radical ideas of divine love and holy purity.8 In the decades after an English pope, Adrian IV, ruled in Rome (1155–9), English bishops also became increasingly involved in international church politics, fueled in part by the new schools in Paris that were now becoming the standard training grounds for an emerging clerical class. 6  On the period of transition from the reign of King Stephen, see Emilie Amt, The Accession of Henry II in England: Royal Government Restored, 1149–1159 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1993). 7  Henry’s contributions to legal reform have most recently been discussed in John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from King Alfred to Magna Carta, second edition (London: Routledge, 2014), ch. 6. See also Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 136–73; Doris M. Stenton, English Justice Between the Norman Conquest and the Great Charter, 1066–1215 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), ch. 2; Ralph V. Turner, The English Judiciary in the Age of Glanvill and Bracton, c.1176–1239 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 17–64; and Paul Brand, “Henry II and the Creation of the English Common Law,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 215–41. On Henry’s financial reforms, see H.  G.  Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England from the Conquest to the Magna Carta (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), pp. 216–50; G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 188–93. Emilie Amt, The Accession of Henry II, pp. 119–31; David Carpenter, “ ‘In Testamonium Factorum Brevium:’ The Beginnings of the English Chancery Rolls,” in Records, Administration and Aristocratic Society in the Anglo-Norman Realm, edited by Nicholas Vincent, (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 1–28; John Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England, 1170–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 91–110; For more general shifts in record keeping and written mechanisms, see Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 67–68. See also W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 301–17. A broader analysis appears in Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Languages and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 30–87. For Henry II, see especially Stock’s comments on pp. 58–9. 8 On twelfth-century religious change in England, see David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge: The University Press, 1940); Charles Duggan, “From the Conquest to the Death of John,” in The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages, edited by C. H. Lawrence (London: Burn and Oats, 1965), pp. 63–115; Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c.1130–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Anne J. Duggan, “Henry II, the English Church and the Papacy,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 154–83; Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Hugh Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England, 1066–1216 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe  5 Henry II’s powerful laughter can tell us a great deal about this changing political context. On the one hand, it highlights the considerable importance of contingency and flexibility in Henry’s government. Lewis Warren, Henry’s greatest modern biographer, once considered the king’s supreme achievement to be his development of an impersonal governmental machinery.9 As the historian John Le Patourel put it, Henry effectively cemented a loose collection of lands into a centralized “feudal” state.10 In more recent decades, however, historians have tended to emphasize Henry’s political spontaneity instead.11 The king’s financial policies were more reactive than proactive, according to James Holt, and his approach to legal reform was “assertive, without . . . an overall plan,” in the view of the legal historian John Hudson.12 For John Gillingham, similarly, Henry’s political decision making was ad hoc and responsive, rather than tightly planned.13 It is clear that Henry was frustrated by many of the protocols he himself had adopted for managing the affairs of state, and it is well known that his emotions often punctuated his leadership style.14 Yet laughter was also a highly productive aspect of Henry’s government, not in opposition to but rather in cooperation with his procedural reforms. By fixing problems thrown up by the governmental machinery, whether deliberately or not, the king’s laughter was able to supplement the abstract tools of power that otherwise constrained him. Within a restrictive framework of written procedure, codification, and bureaucracy, the king’s humor became powerful precisely because it represented an unmediated and irreducible authority. By counterbalancing the very methods of political centralization that enabled his empire to function, Henry’s laughter appeared as a force to shadow and complement the new powers of twelfth-century England. Meanwhile the emergence of the laughing saint illuminates something of the changing power of the passions in twelfth-century devotion and religious politics. Among theologians of the later 1100s the body was increasingly seen as a vehicle of internal grace. Whereas a previous generation had relegated laughter to something one did in the mind rather than in the mouth, influential new theological voices, from Cistercian monks to Parisian exegetes, began arguing that bodily expressions such as laughter could channel an inner harmony and divinity. In cases like the sanctification of Thomas Becket, where spirituality and politics came to 9 Warren, Henry II. 10  John Le Patourel, “The Plantagenet Dominions,” in Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), pp. 289–308. 11  For instance, the two edited volumes produced in the past decade: Writers of the Reign of Henry II, edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), and Henry II: New Interpretations. See especially Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, pp. 313–14. 12 James C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (London: The Hambledon Press, 1985), pp. 28–34; John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law, p. 146. 13  John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire (London: Arnold, 2001), especially p. 116. 14  On Henry’s emotional style of kingship, see the famous study by John  E.  A.  Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955).

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6  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century intersect, the saintly nature of bodily gestures then became a uniquely powerful weapon.15 As recent studies by Martin Aurell and Hugh Thomas have shown, Becket’s minute bodily gestures were intended in the biographies to communicate a specific choreography of martyrdom.16 Laughter’s place within this bodily economy of devotion was potentially very significant, and deserves more attention. More broadly, this book engages with a series of historiographical debates about humor’s nature and role within the wider civilization of the Middle Ages. Curiously the twelfth century has received relatively little attention from scholars of medieval humor. Specialized studies have tended to focus instead on both earlier and later texts, highlighting the philosophical impact of classical writers such as Aristotle, as well as the comic preaching practices of the mendicant orders. Writing in the late 1970s, Joachim Suchomski produced a foundational investigation that emphasized how theologians such as the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (d.1274) embraced Aristotle’s praise of eutrapelia (or “wittiness”) in their Christian ethics. Classical ideas were the key for Suchomski, who passed over the twelfth century as a period when writers “failed to integrate Antique ideas of humor into Christian teaching.”17 A decade later the great Annales historian Jacques Le Goff picked up the argument and adopted the same chronology. In an inspiring essay, Le Goff described how the contingent demands of mendicant preaching in urban centers, alongside the spread of classical rhetoric and philosophy in the universities, combined to allow theologians to embrace laughter as a mode of spiritual expression from the early 1200s onwards.18 Within this view, humor was essentially a hindrance to medieval church authorities until they were able to tame and repurpose it as a tool of orthodoxy. This narrative of a thirteenth-century “Christianization” of laughter has persisted across a range of interdisciplinary approaches in the past decades.19 Jeannine 15  On the impact of theological ideas on court culture, see Fiona Whelan, The Making of Manners and Morals in Twelfth-Century England: The Book of the Civilised Man (London: Routledge, 2017), especially pp. 113–50. 16  Martin Aurell, “Le Meurtre de Thomas Becket: Les Gestes d’un Martyre,” in Bischofsmord im Mittelalter, Murder of Bishops, edited by N. Fryde and D. Reitz (Göttingen: Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 187– 210; Hugh Thomas, “Shame, Masculinity, and the Death of Thomas Becket,” Speculum 87: 4 (October 2012), pp. 1050–88. 17 Joachim Suchomski, “Delectatio” und “Utilitas”: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis mittelalterlicher komischer Literatur (Munich: Francke, 1975), pp. 30–5, pp. 55–61, and p. 65. 18  Jacques Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages,” in A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 40–53, originally published as “Rire au Moyen Age,” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 3 (1989), pp. 1–19. See also Jacques Le Goff, Saint Francis of Assisi, translated by Christine Rhone (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 122–3. For a very similar view, published slightly before Le Goff, see Irven M. Resnick, “ ‘Risus Monasticus’: Laughter and Medieval Culture,” Revue Bénédictine 97 (1987), pp. 90–100. While Resnick discusses changes in philosophy and mainly monastic theology, he does not approach the issue as a broad historical problem in the same way as Le Goff. 19  Some insightful essays on laughter in medieval literature have appeared in the last twenty years, yet while they have shed light on theoretical and textual dynamics of laughter in texts, they have done little to challenge the narrative of a “Christianization” in the 1200s. For example, Risus Mediaevalis: Laughter in Medieval Literature and Art, edited by Herman Braet, Guido Latré, and Werner Verbeke

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Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe  7 Horowitz and Sophia Menache expanded the view in their influential book L’humour en chaire, illuminating how thirteenth-century mendicant preachers appropriated humor as a tool of moral instruction, adapting it to the particular demands of an urban audience.20 Jean Verdon echoed these points in his broad history of the subject, again identifying a Christian turn to laughter in the lives of Saints Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas.21 Moving away from texts, both Willibald Sauerländer and Paul Binski have extended this chronology into the visual arts. Demonstrating a multiplication of positive Christian images of laughter during the thirteenth century, they have persuasively suggested that the 1100s were instead dominated by images of laughing devils and demons.22 In a sign of growing consensus across disciplines, a recent collection of essays (published to accompany an exhibition in Mainz) outlined a similar change in Christian debates about laughter in the decades after 1200.23 Once again, these new studies overwhelmingly stressed the role of Aristotle’s philosophy and its thirteenth-century scholastic interpreters in adapting laughter as a positive Christian theme. Where the twelfth century has been the subject of debate, it has often been described as a time of growing anxieties about the abuses of humor. Olga V. Trokhimenko’s important recent book, Constructing Virtue and Vice, has added a vital layer of nuance to the “Christianization” narrative. Pointing to increasing concerns about laughter (particularly women’s laughter) in ecclesiastical and courtly texts from the 1150s onwards, Trokhimenko’s work highlights how, despite the resurgence of Aristotle, theologians continued to be deeply uncomfortable in dealing with the issue. As Christian thinkers began putting more emphasis on the role of the body in devotion, she argues, many within the Church paradoxically fought to control laughter. So, while writers such as Aquinas celebrated it as a necessary human bodily expression, others such as Vincent of Beauvais continued (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003); Grant Risee? The Medieval Comic Presence, edited by Adrian  P.  Tudor and Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Medieval English Comedy, edited by Sandra M. Hordis and Paul Hardwick (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 20 Jeannine Horowitz and Sophia Menache, L’humour en chaire: Le rire dans l’Eglise médiévale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1994). See especially, pp. 243–4. This argument is reiterated in Georges Minois, Histoire du Rire et de la Derision (Paris: Fayard, 2000). Minois discusses the Christianization of laughter at pp. 95–215. See also Jacques E. Merceron, “The Sacred and the Laughing Body in French Hagiographic and Didactic Literature of the Middle Ages,” in Risus Sacer – Sacrum Risible, Interaktionsfelder von Sakralität und Gelächter im kulturellen und historischen Wandel, edited by Katja Gvozdeva and Werner Röcke, pp. 101–16 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), especially pp. 103–4. 21  Jean Verdon, Rire au Moyen Age (Paris: Perrin, 2001), pp. 24–9. 22  Willibald Sauerländer, “Vom Gelächter des Teufels zur Ironie der Philosophen,” Jahrbuch der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste 13 (1999), 30–70; Paul Binski, ‘The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile,’ Art History 20: 3 (1997), pp. 350–74. For an updated take on these debates in art history, see Monika  E.  Müller, “Das Lachen ist dem Menschen eigen . . . : Seine Darstellung in der Kunst des Mittelalters,” in Seliges Lächeln und höllisches Gelächter: Das Lachen in Kunst und Kultur des Mittlealters, edited by Winifried Wilhelmy, pp. 68–91 (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2012). 23  Seliges Lächeln. See particularly Winifried Wilhelmy, “Das leise Lachen des Mittelalters – Lächeln, Lachen und Gelächter in den Schriften christlicher Gelehrter (300-1500),” pp. 38–55.

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8  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century to condemn it, defiantly citing the authority of patristic writers.24 Trokhimenko is certainly correct to suggest that the thirteenth century saw an enduring hostility to laughter, and her emphasis on anxiety takes the debate to a level of complexity that gets us beyond more straightforward ideas of “Christianization.” Nevertheless, as Trokhimeko concedes, her work is limited by its literary and philological focus. Beyond the material she addresses, there is much that remains to be said about the miraculous and awe-inspiring laughter that gripped many hagiographers, monks, medical writers, and biblical exegetes in the 1100s. Medievalists have long recognized the productive importance of humor in Christianity.25 Most notably, Martha Bayless has uncovered a lively culture of comedy in a great variety of ecclesiastical texts.26 Exploring how medieval clerics produced mock saints’ lives and parodic sermons, mostly for an ecclesiastical audience, Bayless has argued that this material was primarily meant to be fun. She rejects the idea that playful imitations of serious religious forms were automatically “subversive,” and criticizes Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival for suggesting that laughter was overly restricted and circumscribed in medieval religious life.27 Instead, Bayless emphasizes how laughter and comic play existed alongside serious Christian practices, and advises that the comic should be considered as an intrinsic part of medieval devotion, rather than as its natural opponent. To paraphrase another scholar who has recently extended the same position, laughter can be best understood as a “universal presence” in medieval life, an impulse waiting to burst through rules and codes at any given time.28 But the laughter at Henry II’s court suggests something more substantial than either fun or comic relief. What makes the saintly laughter of Thomas Becket so intriguing is that it was understood as having a holy, even mystical potential all of its own.29 We are long overdue a study that takes the role of laughter and humor in medieval sanctity seriously. Work that has been done so far on this topic has typically focused on the later figure of Saint Francis of Assisi (d.1226). According to Carlo Ginzburg, Franciscan “holy humor” worked above all by confounding expectations in acts of “carnivalesque” inversion, such as kissing lepers and rolling 24 Olga V. Trokhimenko, Constructing Virtue and Vice: Femininity and Laughter in Courtly Society (ca. 1150–1300) (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2014), pp. 63–89. Her major argument here is stated on p. 78. 25  For an overview, see Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: Laughter in the History of Religion (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 60–101. 26 Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 27 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968). 28  Stefan Bießenecker, “A Small History of Laughter, or When Laughter Has to be Reasonable,” in Behaving Like Fools: Voice, Gesture, and Laughter in Texts, Manuscripts, and Early Books, edited by Lucy Perry and Alexander Schwarz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 193–222. 29  As Jacques Merceron has intimated, this kind of “rire sacralisant” alluded ultimately to “a future of eternal bliss.” Jacques E. Merceron, “The Sacred and the Laughing Body in French Hagiographic and Didactic Literature of the Middle Ages,” in Risus Sacer – Sacrum Risible: Interaktionsfelder von Sakralität und Gelächter im kulturellen und historischen Wandel, edited by Katja Gvozdeva and Werner Röcke (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 101–16; p. 108.

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Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe  9 with pigs, that challenged human dignity.30 If the saintly humor of Francis is seen as transcendent in these accounts then, as John Saward has argued, this is because it defied social norms, working within a tradition of “holy folly” that held foolishness and non-conformity as humble virtues.31 Yet the saintly laughter attributed to Thomas Becket appears to have been far more aggressive and political in nature. Transcending the human institutions that attempted to limit his “divine” authority,32 Becket’s laughter represents a uniquely political, bellicose form of saint’s laughter that has yet to be studied in its own right. Another principal aim of this book is to assess the role of laughter in medieval politics. Historians have long acknowledged the importance of humor in smoothing political tensions, although they have usually cast it in the rather straightforward role of a means to an end.33 One exception is Stephen Jaeger’s work on medieval courtliness, which has drawn attention to the more complex psychological ways that humor operated in medieval political conflicts.34 Courtiers such as John of Salisbury, Jaeger argues, used irony as a way of distancing themselves from a culture of debate that encouraged fierce backbiting and a nervous consensus. Irony became a mode of survival in this environment, Jaeger argues, as well as an indirect means for offering a more oblique form of court critique.35 In a similar spirit, Hugh Thomas’s recent article in Speculum has stressed how Henry’s court itself produced a culture in which humiliation had a huge impact on political standing.36 While these are important observations, it is clear that more study needs to be done to do justice to the many nuanced and powerful ways that humor worked in medieval political culture. We still lack any real understanding of how laughter functioned in medieval law, for instance, or in medieval bureaucracy, or in moments of brutal political violence. The political regime of Henry II, which specialized in all three, should provide the perfect opportunity to begin taking these issues further. Moving in scope from broad to narrow, this book has two parts. Chapters 1 and 2 will investigate laughter’s growing political and religious power in twelfthcentury thought and literature. Taking on the widest range of material available to 30  Carlo Ginzburg, “Folklore, magia, religione,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1: I caratteri originali (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), pp. 603–76, pp. 615–16. 31  John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 84–9. On this issue, see also the excellent work in Max Harris, Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). On this topic, see also Peter  J.  A.  Jones, “Humility and Humiliation: The Transformation of Franciscan Humour, c.1210–1310,” Journal of Cultural and Social History 15: 2 (2018), pp. 155–75. 32 For this analysis of Christian laughter, see Patrick Laude, Divine Play, Sacred Laughter, and Spiritual Understanding (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), pp. 142–3. 33  See for example Peter Godman, “The Archpoet and the Emperor,” in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 74 (2011), pp. 31–58, p. 57. 34  C.  Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), especially p. 168. 35  C. Stephen Jaeger, “Irony and Role-Playing in John of Salisbury and the Becket Circle,” in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224): Actes du Colloque tenu à Poitiers du 2 au 5 mai 2002, edited by Martin Aurell (Poitiers: Civilisation Médiévale, 2003), pp. 319–31. 36  Hugh Thomas, “Shame, Masculinity,” pp. 1050–88.

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10  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Henry’s courtiers, these two chapters represent a broad interrogation of laughter’s significance in the twelfth century. By next focusing on Henry’s court and the king’s conflict with Thomas Becket, the second part of the book (Chapters 3 to 5) will explore how this emerging significance translated into acts of political, saintly, and sovereign power. While the first part of the book, therefore, looks at wider concepts and descriptions of laughter across a great many texts, the second part turns to examine laughter in action within the smaller set of letters, chronicles, and histories that survive from Henry II’s court, as well as the biographies and miracle collections of Saint Thomas produced in the decade or so after his death. We will hear, in the first two chapters of the book, from the many intellectuals and poets whose ideas laid the groundwork for images of powerful laughter at Henry’s court. Through a genealogical study of intellectual debates known within the king’s circle, the first chapter examines the changing place of laughter in philosophical, exegetical, monastic, rhetorical, satirical, and medical discussions throughout the 1100s. Although this is a broad range of material, there are a number of key convergences. As I will suggest, the way laughter was talked about in theology had close parallels to the way it was discussed in rhetoric, in medicine, and in philosophy. A concern that united these different debates was the role of the body. As the evidence tentatively suggests, writers of all kinds gradually came to embrace embodied laughter as a vehicle for Christian devotion and grace, as well as a potent expression of political power. Abstract ideas, however, do not give the whole picture of laughter’s place in the imagination. My second chapter turns to look at laughter’s changing role in twelfth-century narrative. Building on the classic work of Philippe Ménard, as well as the more recent observations of Gerd Dicke and Albrecht Classen, this chapter looks at a wealth of historical, poetic, hagiographic, and epic literature as a way of surveying the different narrative motifs of laughter that appeared in texts from the 1100s.37 Exploring how laughter emerged as a sign of mystical contact, as well as a sin for which people were divinely punished, I argue that it began to acquire a prophetic and political potential for revelation in narrative from the 1130s onwards. Most importantly, laughter came to be associated with the power of prophetic revelation in the lives of saints such as Edward the Confessor, and with miraculous disease and charismatic authority in chronicles of kings such as William Rufus. On the one hand these developments owed much to the new intellectual perspectives on laughter that I described in the previous chapter. Yet I will also emphasize how motifs from classical texts, such as Suetonius’s Lives of

37  Philippe Ménard, Le Rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen Age (1150–1250) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969); Albrecht Classen, “Laughter as an Expression of Human Nature in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: Literary, Historical, Theological, Philosophical, and Psychological Reflections,” in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (New York: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 1–140; especially pp. 56–60.

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Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe  11 the Caesars, left a profound stamp on how charismatic traits such as laughter were immortalized in the historical record. My third chapter focuses on the social and political world of the royal court. Here, as I will suggest, laughter’s emerging connections to sublime revelation fused with a cynical political culture to create a twin ethic of humor. First of all, it came to be prized as a weapon for exposing “truths” behind the masks and hierarchies of court life. At the same time that conduct manuals were urging courtiers to cultivate wit above other faculties, veterans in royal service were reminding one another to joke and laugh when in the company of the king. In a setting where courtiers were terrified of speaking the truth to power, it seems that laughter, as a non-explicit act, became a unique way of showing the un-showable and saying the unsayable. On the one hand, this ethic could be edifying, in the form of erudite satires or witty observational humor. On the other hand, however, it could also be spiteful or corrosive, in the form of humiliating derision or career-ruining jokes. Through the formidable tension between these positive and negative ethics, I argue, Henry’s court writers ultimately created a space for images of laughing saints and laughing kings to have especially powerful effects. Working with these ideas, my fourth chapter looks at the dynamic role of laughter in the retrospective construction of Thomas Becket’s sanctity. Reading in particular the hagiographies and miracle collections produced after Becket’s death, I investigate the curious prominence of laughter in the cult of his sainthood. Becket laughed and joked before he was martyred, he was reputed to have played jokes from beyond the grave on unsuspecting pilgrims, and he was even celebrated for making people laugh as he miraculously brought them back from the dead. Investigating how and why writers came to be obsessed with Saint Thomas’s laughter, this chapter highlights how his reputation for courtly jocularity was recast as one of his defining saintly virtues, and how in the process the political codes of laughter at Henry’s court were translated into saintly practices. Finally, the fifth chapter approaches the image of the laughing king himself, Henry II. In a series of close readings of moments when the king was shown laughing and joking while intervening in law, during diplomatic confrontations, and in his dealings with the Church hierarchy, this chapter suggests that humor became an inadvertent tool of Henry’s sovereign exceptionalism. As I show, in Henry’s government humor circumscribed tensions between process and presence, allowing the king essentially to subvert and transcend his own network of written codes and rules through the ambiguity of laughter. Yet Henry’s laughter was also a textual effect, one meant to communicate to readers a distinct image of sovereign authority. Picking up on intellectual discourses that dignified joking as a truth-telling device, as well as on poetic ideas of laughter as a mouthpiece for divine authority, writers of Henry’s reign ultimately fixated on the image of laughing kingship as it provided a unique way of reinstating charismatic, or sublime, royal authority within the course of their narratives.

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12  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Before beginning, it is necessary to establish a few working definitions. Perhaps most important is the definition of laughter. It is fair to say that laughter is both a bodily reaction and a social sign. It can be triggered by humor, surprise, joy, anxiety, and occasionally by fear. In the twelfth century, it was also said to be triggered by prophecies, by miracles, and by a particular hyperactivity of the spleen. One of the aims of this book is to set aside modern definitions and try to uncover what laughter meant in medieval society. But this can lead to some confusion. Today we make a clear distinction between “laughter” and “humor,” but in the texts of the 1100s this was not the case. As no specific word for “humor” was available in medieval Latin, writers frequently used the word risus, along with the related verb ridere, to designate both the act of laughter and the process of making others laugh.38 Joking was often described, vaguely, as an act of “hilaritas” (cheerfulness), as a type of “levitas” (lightness), or else as a moment of “scurrilitas” (buffoonery). Working with this material, I have been cautious throughout this book to highlight distinctions between the social act of laughter, the use of humor, and more generic descriptions of good cheer. It is important to observe, however, that medieval writers did not always make these same distinctions themselves. One boundary that was closely observed was laughter’s degree of magnitude, which writers usually measured on a spectrum from gentle smiling to raucous howling. Although a few translators have occasionally preferred to render risus as “smile,” this does not fit twelfth-century usage. When Latin writers in the 1100s wanted to convey smiling, they usually described a person as showing a hilaris vultus, or else they adopted the verbs subridere and arridere. The word Risus, for these writers, was reserved for the noisy and more bodily act of laughing. At the other end of the spectrum, a more charged word in the medieval vocabulary was cachinnum, which almost always carried the meaning of a loud cackle or a vulgar laugh. I should also define what I mean by Henry’s court, and, by extension, “England.” Henry’s court can expand or contract significantly depending on how we define it. At the very top, the arch courtiers can be identified as Robert of Beaumont (d.1168), Richard de Lucy (d.1179), and Ranulf de Glanvill (d.1190), nobles who Henry employed as Chief Justiciars. Other key figures were the Royal Chancellors, Geoffrey Ridel (d.1189) and, notoriously, Thomas Becket. But while the king had relatively few central office holders, the court entourage was swollen with dozens of writers, jongleurs, and domestics, as well as hundreds of bureaucrats, accountants, and functionaries.39 For the purposes of this study, I have limited my definition of “the court” to the circle of individuals who knew the king personally, who participated in the social and political life of his entourage, and who left some kind of record of their experiences. While this is certainly a narrow definition, it has the 38  For examples of this ambiguity in action, see Gilbert of Poitiers, Commentaria in Librum de Duabus Naturis et una Persona Christi, PL vol. 64, Natura, col. 1364B; and Alan of Lille, Regulae Theologicae, PL, vol. 210, number 101, cols. 675C-676A. 39  Egbert Türk, Nugae curialium: Le règne d’Henri II Plantagenêt (1145–1189) et l’ethique politique (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1977), pp. 6–7.

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Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe  13 advantage of referring to a relatively coherent, focused, and self-aware group. This was a literate community close to the king, made up of individuals who self-identified as “courtiers” (curiales), and who consciously engaged in conversations about conduct, social etiquette, and power within what they understood as a court environment. Although writers such as John of Salisbury and Walter Map may not have overlapped in real time, when they wrote about how to behave in the presence of the king they nevertheless engaged in shared debates about the ethics and practices of being a member of Henry II’s entourage.40 All of this took place in a space that we may call the “Angevin Empire.”41 Alongside the Kingdom of England, Henry II inherited the Dukedom of Normandy from his mother, and the County of Anjou from his father. Following his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine (d.1204), Henry also acquired control of the Duchy of Aquitaine and the County of Poitou. Eleanor had been the wife of Henry’s rival King Louis VII of France, and this marriage was initially a strategic triumph in strengthening Henry’s territorial claims.42 Through later military conquests Henry added Gascony, Brittany, and Ireland to an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Scottish borderlands. Henry’s court was therefore an international entourage in constant flux, moving between England and parts of France to the papal curia and beyond. They wrote in Latin, spoke mostly in French, and read works from around the European intellectual community. In many ways “England” does not quite do justice to this vast political and cultural space. Yet for all the court’s itinerancy, the two major theaters for much of the laughter in this book—Henry’s expansion of law and administration, and his conflict with Thomas Becket—both took place in England. While I am concerned with transnational ideas, therefore, England remains both the heart and center of this book’s discussion. Another issue is one of emphasis. If laughter was so important at Henry’s court, what about other bodily expressions, such as weeping or the gnashing of teeth? On the one hand it is clear that the upsurge of interest in laughter ran in parallel to other changes to the body’s role in medieval society. Excellent work has been done by scholars such as Kimberley-Joy Knight and Susan Kramer, for instance, showing the importance of tears in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century devotion.43 As Katherine Harvey has shown, a “tear-drenched” hagiography conveyed a

40 This point is also made in Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, p. 320. 41  John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire. 42  For recent work on Eleanor, see Bonnie Wheeler and John C. Parsons, eds., Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); Ralph Turner, Eleanor of Aquitaine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Colette Bowie, The Daughters of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). 43  Kimberley-Joy Knight, “Si puose calcina a’ propi occhi: The importance of the Gift of Tears for Thirteenth-Century Religious Women and their Hagiographers,” in Crying in the Middle Ages. Tears of History, edited by Elina Gertsman (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 136–55; Susan  R.  Kramer, Sin, Interiority, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016), pp. 55–82.

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14  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century unique kind of emotional saintly power in this period.44 Yet while tears and smiles may be superficially similar, to do them justice they must be treated on their own terms. Laughter is more than just a bodily expression or an affective strategy. It can also be a code of ethics, an anarchic political weapon, or else a means for escaping one regime of power and engaging with another. Connections with other discourses of bodily affect should be recognized, and I will discuss parallels with tears at many points throughout the book. Ultimately, however, I have felt that a thorough investigation of laughter’s unique capacities and powers is sufficient for a study by itself. Uncovering the twelfth-century philosophy of laughter is something of a ­theory-making exercise in itself. Nevertheless, two insights from modern philosophy and critical theory have been key to the ways that I have interpreted twelfth-century texts. Although these are both fairly old theories, they remain significant landmarks in the philosophy of humor, and the way that they describe laughter articulates something that I believe lies at the heart of the political dynamic at Henry’s court. First is the approach of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson (d.1941). In Bergson’s theory, laughter is understood as typically arising from existential incongruities. When “mechanical” elements obscure “living” things, Bergson argued in his classic book Le rire (1900), people laugh as they suddenly glimpse an incommensurable space between real life and the artifice superimposed upon it.45 Bergson gives the example of a joke made by a British politician after a man had been found murdered in the cabin of a train. Reporting to the House of Commons, the MP explained that “the assassin, after dispatching his victim, must have got out of the wrong side of the train, thereby infringing the company’s rules.”46 What makes this kind of joke work so well, according to Bergson, is how it momentarily places an artificial element (i.e., the specific rules and policies of a train company) on an equal footing with a matter of instinct (i.e., the “rule” of not killing a fellow human being). Laughter, according to Bergson, is a process by which we recognize the true gulf between these two things, between the basic intuitions of human nature and the artificialities that are imposed upon them.47 Obviously, this theory has its flaws, not least its assumption of a “natural” human life that supposedly stands in opposition to these artificial or “mechanical” 44  Katherine Harvey, “Episcopal Emotions: Tears in the Life of the Medieval Bishop,” Historical Research 87: 238 (November 2014), pp. 591–610. 45  Henri Bergson, Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Éditions Alcan, 1924). 46 Bergson, Le rire, p. 26. 47 For a survey of other incongruity theories of laughter, including the views of Kant and Schopenhauer, see Michael Clark, “Humour and Incongruity,” Philosophy 45:171 (1970), pp. 20–32; and John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humour (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 9–15. Another very persuasive view of humor, using psychoanalytic and Hegelian theories to move beyond Bergson’s apparent dualism, is Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), especially pp. 111–26.

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Introduction: Laughter and Power in Medieval Europe  15 processes.48 Generally speaking, however, Bergson’s analysis captures one of the essential issues underpinning many of the most important jokes that were enjoyed at Henry’s court. By the reckoning of Nicholas Vincent, royal courtiers often “felt they were behaving in artificial ways, speaking in artificial accents” in their time surrounding the king.49 As a new generation of arriviste young men came to encounter the web of strict codes and manners at the Angevin court, they would have become sharply aware of disconnects between their own interior being and their closely policed external actions.50 Following Bergson, studying the laughter of these courtiers can be used as a way of studying a fundamental social and ­psychological incongruity at the heart of medieval English political life. My analysis of the relationship between laughter and sovereignty has also been informed by the work of another French philosopher, Georges Bataille (d.1962). Many modern theorists have suggested that laughter is ultimately a conservative force, something that appeals to a kind of regressive “common sense.” Simon Critchley, for instance, has suggested that when people laugh they are essentially taking exception to a position that stands outside their existing stock of k­ nowledge, a process that reminds them of a “familiar domain of shared life-world practices.”51 By contrast, Georges Bataille sees laughter as a liberating leap into the unknown, a momentary abyss that allows people to experience a temporary release from conventional limitations. When a person laughs ecstatically, for Bataille, they are temporarily released from the set of norms that constrict their lives.52 As he explains, “When I am laughing . . . the impossible is before me. I am happy but everything is impossible.”53 More specifically, laughter corresponds to what Bataille calls “nonknowledge,” a form of experience that manages to escape reason or understanding. By momentarily exposing the limitations imposed by law and other arbitrary forms of power, this kind of ecstatic laughter allows ­people to conceive of a kind of sovereignty that exists entirely independently of them.54 Thinking about this relationship at Henry’s court, Bataille’s ideas can be taken to highlight a crucial tension. While twelfth-century politics multiplied new mechanisms of authority, 48  For an extensive four-part critique of incongruity theories along these lines, see Robert L. Latta, The Basic Humor Process: A Cognitive-shift Theory and the Case Against Incongruity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1999), pp. 126–218. 49 This quotation is from Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, p. 334. 50  It is in precisely such an existential gap, according to many philosophers of humor, that laughter thrives as a means of negotiating the self. See for example Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 51  Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 79–87. 52 Georges Bataille, “Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears,” in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, edited by Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 133–50. 53 Georges Bataille, “Method of Meditation,” in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, pp. 77–100, p. 89. 54  Georges Bataille, “Nonknowledge.”

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16  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century court writers maintained an obsession with immediate and charismatic authority. Beyond the scrutinized order of the Angevin court and the shifting ambiguities of political hierarchies, the laughter of frustrated clerks such as Walter Map and Peter of Blois arguably allowed these courtiers to enjoy moments of genuine release, while simultaneously imagining an alternative political order that might lie beyond these new constraints. Ultimately, however, this book is a work of history. If nothing else, I hope it will be able to illuminate the crucial role of laughter in negotiating power within the changing political and religious climate of twelfth-century England. In so many of the writings that I will explore, humor emerges again and again as a bridge between sacred and secular discourses of power. Descriptions of Thomas Becket’s laughter, for instance, were exceptional for translating his courtly practices into a hagiographical register. “Just as he was once urbane in matters of the world,” John of Poitiers observed, “so now he is pleasantly humorous in his miracles.” (Gloriosus martyr noster, qui sicut et in saecularibus exstitit urbanus, sic et in miraculis invenitur facetus).55 At the same time King Henry’s laughter was closely associated with a mystical or holy potential. In the writings of John of Salisbury and Gerald of Wales, notably, Henry was compared to older laughing prophets, such as Saint Edward the Confessor, or else his humor was imagined as triggering death and damnation. It is no coincidence that we find descriptions of supreme authority intersecting in the act of laughter. As we will see, a peculiar set of intellectual, literary, and social discourses converged to open up a space for laughter at the very apex of both sovereign and saintly power by the late 1100s. It is this book’s final purpose to give an account of how this convergence worked.

55  John of Poitiers, Letter to Odo of Canterbury, Becket Materials, vol. 1, p. 373.

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1

The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200 He laughs: he rejoices, he is happy. I laugh, you laugh, laughed, laugh. Laughable, a joke, charm, wit, a guffaw. Dictionarium Papae, Montpellier, Bibliothèque de Médecine MS H107, fol.300v What did laughter mean to people in the twelfth century? When writers at Henry II’s court, such as Gerald of Wales or John of Salisbury, encountered laughter, what train of associations, ideas, and beliefs were triggered in their minds? A very concise answer to this question appears in the rudimentary twelfth-century glossary, the Dictionarium Papae.1 Intended for use in the papal library, the dictionary suggests an arresting spectrum of synonyms for laughter, ranging from rejoicing and delight to wit, charm, urban sophistication, and abject silliness. These definitions are deceptively straightforward, and it would be easy to conflate them with modern assumptions. But laughter was a complicated and highly controversial phenomenon for intellectuals in the 1100s. Across a great web of theological, rhetorical, philosophical, and medical texts, thinkers traded polemical debates about what laughter was, how it worked in the body, and what it ultimately meant as both a social and moral sign. Questions about laughter intersected with many of the twelfth-century’s most pivotal intellectual debates. The role of logic in theology was at stake, for instance, when scholars such as Alan of Lille or Peter the Chanter debated Jesus’s laughter. For canons and monks such as Hugh of St Victor or Bernard of Clairvaux, laughter was pivotal in thinking about the limits of spiritual anthropology. Elsewhere, emerging classical views of laughter challenged the canonical positions of Church Fathers such as Augustine. A new zeal for preaching among the secular clergy prompted divisive commentary on laughter’s use in rhetoric. And, at a time when satire was undergoing its greatest Latin renaissance, the curative character of derisive laughter was at issue in both the schoolroom and the King’s court. In a century famous for its great developments in theology, philosophy, and the

1  Montpellier, Bibliothèque de Médecine MS H107, fol.300v. “Ridet: gaudet, letatur. . . . Ridiculus, iocus, lepos, urbanitas, cachinnus.” Note that this text is not to be confused with the Anonymi Montepessulanensis Dictionarius, a fourteenth-century dictionary from the same library (MS H236).

Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century. Peter Jones, Oxford University Press (2019). © Peter J. A. Jones. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001

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18  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century s­piritual life, the place of laughter cannot be underestimated. As an index of ­intellectual change, the great mass of twelfth-century attitudes to laughter is a knot that demands our untangling. This chapter will remain focused on a network of texts available to the writers associated with King Henry’s court. In order to keep the investigation grounded I will center on six intellectual debates, encompassing theological, philosophical, monastic, classical, scholastic, and medical texts from c.1100–1200. Along the way I have made every effort to consult unedited and unpublished manuscript material wherever possible to bring new perspectives to discussion. First, I will consider spiritual approaches, examining the exegesis of biblical laughter in twelfth-century glosses and commentaries, before looking at laughter’s place in monastic theology. Next, I will explore how twelfth-century writers absorbed classical satire, as well as debates in philosophy about laughter’s status as a human property. Keeping with the classical theme, I will then look at the development of attitudes to laughter in rhetorical guidebooks from the period. Returning ultimately to the body, the chapter will finish with a brief assessment of laughter’s place in medical works. Ultimately, my aim here is to understand how laughter was considered in the abstract. This approach is quite distinct from a study of how and why people laughed, employed laughter, or imaginatively constructed laughing figures. Making this distinction is important, not least because twelfth-century thinkers themselves went to great trouble to separate laughter’s practical and theoretical dimensions. John of Salisbury wrote in his letters how he enjoyed being moved to laughter by his courtly correspondents.2 Yet, when it came to discussing the subject abstractly, he reminded his friend of the verse from Proverbs 14: 13, “laughter is mingled with grief.”3 The practical approach is of course important, and my second and third chapters will give an extended study of laughter in narrative, as well as in social and political life. But for now, my focus is on abstract discussions, on explicit ideas of laughter that circulated on their own terms. Identifying a general twelfth-century position on laughter may be impossible. Views on the subject encompass a wide sea, to the extent that one recent scholar concluded “there was no medieval theology of laughter.”4 Yet some striking patterns do appear across several debates. In particular, concepts of laughter crystallized around two moral poles, with connections to divine presence and final damnation that gave laughter a considerable power. Perhaps more surprisingly, it appears that divine associations with laughter increased in legitimacy and scope

2 John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury, edited by W.  J.  Millor, H.  E.  Butler, and Christopher N. L. Brooke, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 112. 3  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, Letter 242, p. 473. 4  Stefan Bießenecker, “A Small History of Laughter, or When Laughter Has to Be Reasonable,” in Behaving Like Fools: Voice, Gesture, and Laughter in Texts, Manuscripts, and Early Books, edited by Lucy Perry and Alexander Schwarz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 193–222, p. 203. See also Gerhard Marcel Martin, “Zur Idee einer Theologie des Lachens,” Una Sancta 52 (1997): pp. 266–74.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  19 in the period after c.1150. Although its meaning oscillated between divinity and damnation, between indiscipline and transcendence, between morality and utility, between humanity and inhumanity, between refinement and vulgarity, and between sickness and health, by the years of Henry II’s reign laughter was becoming a potent sign of sublime power.

Theology When medieval writers confronted any subject, the Bible was never far from their minds. A number of scholars have counted and scrutinized biblical references to laughter.5 Among other things, they have pointed out that laughing was often praised in the Old Testament and condemned in the New.6 Yet reading the Bible today hardly gives a fair picture of how it would have been perceived in the time of King Henry. To understand how the Bible was absorbed into intellectual and imaginative debates in the twelfth century it should be read as it was in twelfthcentury schools: through the prism of glosses and commentaries. Without doubt, the most widely used and representative of these commentaries was the Glossa Ordinaria, a text known to contemporaries simply as the “Gloss.” Compiled at the beginning of the twelfth century and popularized in the following decades, the Glossa’s series of authoritative commentaries, taken from the likes of Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, became an indispensable tool for biblical scholarship.7 Henry’s educated courtiers would have had extensive contact with the text. John of Salisbury, for instance, was a student of the man thought to have compiled much of the Glossa, Anselm of Laon (d.1117).8 Meanwhile, Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, Peter of Blois, and Thomas Becket all studied in Paris at a time when the Glossa had become a standardized, ubiquitous textbook.9 There are two dozen or so passages discussing laughter in the Glossa, which taken together build an image of laughter as something foolish, blasphemous, and damnable, but occasionally moral and prophetic too. It is a polarization most explicitly laid out in the Glossa’s commentary on an episode in the Book of Genesis. When the elderly Abraham and Sarah were told by an angel that they would have 5  See, for example, the survey in Bießenecker, “A Small History of Laughter,” p. 203ff. 6 Michael  A.  Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), ­especially pp. 28ff. 7  On the role of the Church Fathers in the Glossa, see E. A. Matter, “The Church Fathers and the Glossa Ordinaria,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, edited by Ian Backus, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1993–97), pp. 83–111. 8  For a discussion of the Glossa’s authorship, see Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 17–38; and Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), pp. 46–52. 9  For discussions of Paris as the center of the Glossa’s production and distribution from the 1140s onwards, see Christopher  F.  R.  de Hamel, Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1984); and Smalley, The Study of the Bible, p. 65.

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20  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century another son, they both laughed out loud. But while Abraham fell to the floor and laughed in the open, Sarah hid behind a door and tried to conceal her laughter from God.10 Drawing on the interpretation of Augustine, the Glossa explained that while Abraham’s laughter was an expression of divine joy (laetitia) and wonder at the miracles of God, Sarah’s laughter manifested doubt (dubitationis), denial, and mockery of God’s omnipotence.11 It was a split that influenced much of the commentary that followed.12 While Abraham represented a non-corporeal moral and mystical laughter, Sarah stood for a sinful bodily laughter that distracted Christians from the spiritual path. Developing this sense of sinful bodily laughter, a key passage appeared alongside part of Luke’s Gospel. In Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain, Christ had warned that laughter would ultimately lead to tears. “Woe to you who laugh now,” Jesus said, “for you will come to mourn and weep.”13 Throughout the text of the Glossa this line became a touchstone whenever laughter was discussed as sin, deepening associations between laughter and divine retribution. Alongside the proverb in Ecclesiastes, “there is a time for weeping and a time for laughing” (Tempus flendi et tempus ridendi), the Glossa reminded the reader that this “time for laughing” would only come in the afterlife. “Now,” it cautioned, “is the time for weeping.”14 As the text of the Glossa further explained, the problem with those who laughed in the present life was that they could “neither understand nor bewail the ruin of their sins.”15 While there was no question that laughter would eventually come to the righteous, the Glossa insisted that it could never be enjoyed by Christians while still living. Unsurprisingly, moments of moral laughter in the Bible were therefore interpreted as exclusively non-corporeal. That is, the Glossa maintained that this kind of laughter was situated in the mind or the heart rather than in the body. Reflecting on a passage in Genesis 18, the commentary argued that a perfect laughter

10  Genesis, chs. 17 and 18. 11  Gloss on Genesis 18: 10, Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria, vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), p.  52. For Augustine’s similar commentary on this episode, see his Quaestionum in Heptateuchum, Liber Primus: Quaestiones in Genesim, XVIII: 13, PL vol. 34, col. 558; and also The City of God, 16: 26 and 16: 31. Across the rest of his work, Augustine went on to use the names of Abraham and Sarah as shorthand more generally for two types of laughter—one spiritually acceptable, and the other reprehensible. For instance, when glossing a variety of vain laugh in his Annotationum in Iob, Augustine felt fit to add the label, “this is the laughter of Sarah” (hic est risus Sarae). Annotationum in Iob, PL vol. 34, cols.856–7. 12  On the gendered aspect of Sarah’s laughter, see Catherine Conybeare, The Laughter of Sarah: Biblical Exegesis, Feminist Theory, and the Concept of Delight (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);. 13  Luke 6: 21. 14  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 2, p. 697. “Tempus flendi nunc est. In futuro ridendi, beati flentes quam ipsi ridebunt.” 15  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 2, p. 696. “Risum dixi amentiam . . . sic illi qui rident quibus dicitur vae vobis qui ridetis errore saecular aptantur, non intelligentes ruinam peccatorum suorum neque plangentes.” For another example, see Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 2, p. 671.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  21 appeared only as a person mentally “gave birth to joy.”16 More commonly, moral laughter came from those who had lost their earthly bodies altogether. On a passage in Job that described how the “blessed of spirit” would eventually “laugh cheerfully out of glory” (ridebit hilaris ex gloria), the Glossa reminded the reader that this could only occur when the blessed had reached Paradise.17 Likewise, the Glossa situated the laughter of the “spiritually just” from Psalm 51 in “the future life to come.”18 A marginal case was the laughter of the dying. The triumphant living Christian might laugh, the Glossa accepted, only if he was at the final threshold of paradise. Glossing Job 5, the commentator picked up on a passage where a man who had been delivered from all worldly troubles was assured by God that he would “laugh at destruction and famine, and not fear the beasts of the earth.” According to the Glossa, this man’s laughter came from an overflowing happiness at the justice he was receiving. Instead of fearing damnation, “at the point of his death, he will not shudder” (in articulo mortis eius impetus non horreat subdit).19 It is curious to note that this eschatological focus was not prompted by the original Bible passage. Instead, the passage made it clear that Job would laugh here and now, amidst all of his afflictions, because he would come to realize that he was blessed by God. By contrast, the Glossa twisted this original sense to insist that Job’s laughter would only come in the moment of his passing on to the next life. Yet the Glossa also developed the idea that laughter could be a powerful prophetic sign. Typically, this came through readings of God’s laughter, which appears primarily in passages of the Old Testament. Interpreting one of these moments, the Glossa explained that God’s laughter marked a prophecy of the coming of Christ. “God’s mockery is a power of foreknowledge,” the commentary explained, a means by which “he announced to the elect the future coming of Christ.”20 As outlined in another gloss on Job, God’s laughter came in two varieties, one vengeful and the other blissful: God’s laughter is tormenting when he refuses to have mercy. Condemning, he says: “I will laugh in your destruction.” . . . But God’s laughter can also be delightful, as when he rejoices as we seek him out with ardent fervor.21

16  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 1, p. 53. “Unde bene qui generatur risus dicitur quia dum supernae spei fiduciam concipit; quid mens nostra aliud gaudium parit.” 17  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 1, p. 388. 18  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 1, p. 517. 19  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 2, p. 388. 20  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 2, p. 459. “Irrisio dei vis est præscientiæ quam dat Deus sanctis, ut, videntes nomen Christi futurum in omnibus gentibus.” This gloss was also repeated in Peter Lombard’s Gloss on the Psalms, PL vol. 191, col. 71A. “Irrisio Dei est vis praescientiae, quam dat sanctis, ut videntes nomen Christi futurum in omnibus gentibus, et dominationem pervagaturam in posteros, illos inania meditatos intelligant. Et accepit pro eodem, irridebit et subsannabit, etc.” 21  Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 2, p. 395. “Ridere dei est afflictioni nolle misereri unde reprobis dicit; Ego in interitu vestro ridebo [ . . . ] Vel risus dei laetitia est quia gaudet cum ardentius quaeritur a nobis.”

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22  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Certainly, this laughter could have been meant in an entirely metaphorical sense. Nevertheless, the fact that the Glossa associated laughter with prophecy and mystical experience at all, even in the abstract, is deeply significant. Ultimately, the Glossa Ordinaria gave its readers two distinct ideas about laughter. Both essentially point toward a transcendence of the present life. The most prevalent view, grounded in the Book of Genesis and Luke’s Gospel, was that laughter now was a sin punishable by weeping and damnation in the life to come. Any reader of the text would have come away with this as the clearest idea of biblical laughter. Yet an alternative view, stimulated especially by passages in the Old Testament, also associated laughter with the final joys of paradise, with prophecy, and with intense mystical union. While laughing in everyday life was sinful according to the Glossa, laughing without a body, whether in heaven or in the minds of prophets and saints, was considered a privilege of the highest virtue. Although the Glossa was essential reading, Henry II’s courtiers would have also come across a number of alternative glosses circulating in twelfth-century schools.22 One of the most popular texts of this kind was Peter Lombard’s gloss on the Psalms, which became an ubiquitous teaching tool in the classrooms of Parisian masters in the 1160s and 70s.23 Lombard’s gloss is particularly notable for its disgust at bodily laughter. Peter defined derision scathingly as “immoderate cheerfulness,” something practiced only by the “base and abject, who circle around us but are never with us.”24 On the sinful status of bodily laughter, Peter was emphatic. Alongside a passage where God laughed at sinners, Peter stressed that God never laughed while he was made flesh. Instead, Peter distinguished between physical laughter, which involved “wrinkling noses and lolling mouths,” and being touched by God, which he said produced a laughter “in no way carnal.”25 This point, which was repeated in a glossed Psalter used by Thomas Becket and his circle while in exile at Pontigny Abbey,26 opened an intriguing door for views of moral laughter. Nevertheless, this was still the remit of the mind rather than the body. The Glossa’s condemnations echoed throughout all the major works of academic exegesis in the first half of the 1100s. Wherever, for instance, the zealous reformer Gerhoh of Reichersberg (d.1169) encountered laughter in Scripture, he took the opportunity to condemn it. Glossing the Psalms he reminded his reader that it was “sweeter to fast than feast, sweeter to weep than laugh,” a trope he reiterated often in his work.27 Whenever one laughed in the present life, Gerhoh 22  There is a good survey of alternative glosses in Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria, pp. 73–9. 23  See Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria, pp. 200–4. Beryl Smalley wrote that the Lombard’s glossed Psalms “displaced all other glosses” of its kind in the schools of the latter half of the twelfth century. The Study of the Bible, p. 64. 24  Peter Lombard, Psalterium Commentarii, PL vol. 191, col. 432A. 25  Peter Lombard, Psalterium Commentarii, PL vol. 191, col. 71A. 26  Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.5.5, f.12v. 27  Gerhoh of Reichersberg, In Psalmus XI: 9, PL vol. 193, col. 1100B-C. Elsewhere, on Psalm 24 Gerhoh reminds the reader that “est homini sancto delectabilius . . . flere, quam ridere,” col. 1100B-C. Again, on Psalm 38, Gerhoh writes “flere magis quam ridere libet,” col. 1427A.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  23 argued, it would always result in mourning.28 As he insisted instead, moral laughter only came in the “everlasting joy (gaudii sempiterni) of paradise.”29 We can find similar views in the theology of the great scholar Peter Abelard (d.1142). Like Gerhoh, Abelard argued that the good Christian should “sow in laughter what they reaped in tears.”30 Although he praised the laughter of Abraham, Abelard stipulated that it was only acceptable because “he laughed more with his heart than with his mouth” (Abraham . . . riserit corde potius quam ore). In his view, moral laughter could only be manifested in a “joy of the mind” (gaudium . . . mentis).31 All of this theological hostility cast a long shadow over twelfth-century popular sermons. Hildebert of Lavardin (d.1133), a vigorous preacher as well as a reputed biblical scholar, condemned laughter as a type of concupiscence of the body. Denouncing it as a sin, he suggested that tears instead were the body’s natural solemn reaction to the human condition. “We are in misery,” he preached, “and in misery we weep, we do not laugh. When a boy is born, what does he do? He cries!”32 This view that “laughter is injury” (risus iniuria est) was spread around elite and popular audiences alike.33 An anonymous later twelfth-century sermon from Orléans, for instance, announced that “the compensation for laughter is perpetual weeping.”34 As a Kentish vernacular sermon on Saint James put it, while tears could “wash away their sins,”35 weeping in death was the inevitable consequence of those who had enjoyed laughter in their life.36 While moral laughter, by contrast, had been purely non-physical for these earlier theologians, by the later twelfth century a number of new glosses and commentaries began to take a different approach. Gilbert of Poitiers (d.1154), a theologian who taught a few of Henry’s courtiers in Paris, is an early example of a commentator who spoke out to defend laughter’s moral potential in the present life.37 Commenting on Psalm 2, which describes God laughing at his enemies, Gilbert suggested that laughter could sometimes be a Christian virtue. “Derision can be a worthy thing,” he wrote, “so long as it does not fulfill a low purpose.”38 Although Gilbert did not elaborate on the types of derision he had in mind, set against 28  Gerhoh of Reichersberg, In Psalmus XXIX, col. 1265C-D. 29  Gerhoh of Reichersberg, In Psalmus XXIII, col. 1090C. 30  Peter Abelard, Sermones, Sermo VI (In Septuagesima), PL vol. 178, col. 430. 31 Peter Abelard, Commentarium Super  S.  Pauli Epistolam Ad Romanos, IV, PL vol. 178, col. 839A-859B. 32  Hildebert of Lavardin, Sermones, PL vol. 171, col. 469A-B.  “In miseriis sumus, et in miseriis potius plorandum est, quam ridendum. Cum nascitur puer, quid facit? Plorat.” Hildebert’s reference to infant laughter in this context is a reference to Augustine, City of God, 21: 14. “Our infancy, indeed, introducing us to this life not with laughter but with tears.” 33  This line comes from a twelfth-century preaching manuscript: Oxford, MS Bod. 633, f.69v. 34  Orléans, BM MS 198 (175), f.62. 35  Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century, edited and translated by Richard Morris (London: Early English Text Society, 1873), XXV, pp. 146–9. 36  Old English Homilies, XXIX, p. 174. 37  For instance, Gilbert taught Jordan Fantosme, whose education is discussed in Martin Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt (Paris: Perrin, 2003), p. 101. 38  Oxford, Bodleian MS Auct. D. 2. 1, f.9v. “Irrisione dignos reddet cum non impleuint propositum.”

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24  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century the glosses of Peter Lombard and Comestor this still appears to be an important concession.39 Other “peripheral glosses” from this later period gave similarly relaxed views of laughter.40 A glossed Book of Genesis, produced in the 1170s at the Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx, even gave a positive spin on the “sinful” laughter hidden by Sarah when she was told she would have a son. Instead of taking the standard Augustinian interpretation of this passage, this Rievaulx gloss praised Sarah’s laughter as an expression of divine triumph. Adapting an opinion offered elsewhere by Guibert of Nogent (d.1124), the gloss claimed Sarah’s laugh was a bodily manifestation of God’s joy: But the lord filled her heart with joy when she had conquered temptation. So Sarah laughed when she received a son, as if to say “I will triumph amongst all my old enemies.”41

It is not clear whether this triumphant laughter was meant as an active example for others to follow, or whether it was just meant as a symbol of righteousness. Nevertheless, it is further suggestion that associations between laughter and sin were softening in the minds of exegetes. A more emphatic interpretation of moral laughter appeared in the glosses on the Psalms by mystical writer, Richard of St Victor (d.1173). Richard, who corresponded with John of Salisbury and was known to Thomas Becket, was prior of the abbey of St Victor in Paris from 1162–73. In one of his commentaries Richard hypothesized that there were “two types of Christian laughter.” Although his model was God, who according to Psalm 2 had “ridiculed” and “mocked” his enemies, Richard made it clear that this laughter could also translate into good Christian practice. On the one hand, he took “ridicule” to be an offensive weapon, citing the example of ironically exaggerating a person’s achievements as a way of drawing attention to their faults. Yet on the other hand Richard felt that “mockery” could be a way of attaining virtue through humility. It was, as he clarified, a way of highlighting shortcomings in order to elevate a hidden beauty underneath.

39  One commentator has suggested that, in this sort of comment, Gilbert drew heavily on the work of Alcuin of York. See Theresa Gross-Diaz, The Psalms Commentary of Gilbert of Poitiers: From Lectio Divina to the Lecture Room (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 105–6. Certainly, Alcuin’s work placed an emphasis on the “usefulness” of emotional outbursts. But, more ordinarily, he saw tears as useful for devotion, (utilis tristitia), not laughter. 40  For a discussion of some of the more peripheral glosses in the twelfth century, see Beryl Smalley, “Les commentaires bibliques de l’époque romane: glose ordinaire et gloses périmées,” Cahiers de civil­ isation médiévale 4 (1961): 15–26. 41  London, BL MS Add. 63077, f.38v. “Sed cum post victas temptationis dominus cordi hilaritatem infundit. Tunc sara filium suscipit; que risit, quasi dicat voluntas ego in veteram inter omnes inimicos meos.” This passage is adapted from Guibert of Nogent’s Moralium in Genesim, PL vol. 156, ch. 18, cols.142B-C. Another similar glossed text from Rievaulx Abbey survives for the Book of Job. London, BL MS Harleian 5237. The glosses on “God’s laughter” (f.22v; f.63r), however, are the standard Glossa Ordinaria texts.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  25 Therefore, we simulate the beauty of another by ridiculing them, but in some way we dissimulate our beauty by mocking. Or rather we dissimulate the ugliness of another by ridicule, and we simulate our own non-existent ugliness by mocking. Such simulation or dissimulation makes another’s deformity appear more deformed and makes our beauty stand out as more beautiful.42

In Richard’s hands, God’s laughter therefore became a model of good practical advice. Suggesting that moral Christians should mock themselves to appear “more beautiful,” he seems moreover to have anticipated the “holy folly” that characterized the clowning simplicity of the early Franciscan movement.43 Here was laughter, gradually, emerging as a sign of moral humility in its own right. Henry’s courtiers would therefore have encountered two strands of biblical exegesis on laughter. One more established tradition, which they studied at school and heard in popular sermons, denounced bodily laughter as sinful, frivolous, and full of pride. According to this tradition, while weeping would earn the reward of laughter in heaven, laughter now would bring damnation and tears in the afterlife. Yet at the same time another strand of exegesis was appearing that would have sounded altogether more novel and radical to Henry’s courtiers. Glosses were coming to suggest strong connections between laughter and mystical union, and although this featured less prominently in earlier twelfth-century exegesis it persisted nonetheless. And towards the latter part of the twelfth century, in the glosses of Gilbert of Poitiers, in the commentaries on Genesis at Rievaulx, and in the work of Richard of St Victor, even bodily laughter was increasingly being glossed as a moral virtue.

The Monasteries Monastic thought was another central pillar of twelfth-century intellectual life.44 Although Henry’s courtiers did not choose the cloister for themselves, they all maintained close personal ties with members of monastic communities. The Benedictine monk Adam of Eynsham, whose life of Saint Hugh of Avalon included personal encounters with the king, remained a fond associate and correspondent of many of the intellectuals at Henry’s court. Aelred of Rievaulx, the most prominent English Cistercian of his generation, dedicated one of his works to Henry II, and exchanged letters with many of the writers that surrounded the king. 42  Richard of St Victor, Tractates on Certain Psalms, in Writings on the Spiritual Life: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, Walter, and Godfrey of St Victor, edited and translated by Christopher P. Evans (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), p. 153. 43  See Carlo Ginzburg, “Folklore, magia, religione,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1: I caratteri originali (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), pp. 603–76; pp. 615–16. 44  A recent and impassioned argument about the (often hostile) connection between monks and schoolmen at Paris, for instance, is Ian P. Wei, The Intellectual Culture of Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c.1100–1330 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially pp. 87–124.

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26  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Throughout Henry’s entourage, monastic codes of behavior and comportment were the subject of popular debate, and the ideals of a document like the Rule of Saint Benedict were widely known.45 To further grasp how Henry’s courtiers understood laughter, therefore, we must also take into account how the matter was discussed in monastic theology. Before getting underway, we should make a key distinction. Monks without doubt laughed very often in their daily lives. Becket’s associate Nigel Wireker once boasted about the witticisms he made at monastic assemblies, and it can only be imagined they were enjoyed.46 Back in the mid-eleventh century, the Benedictine John of Fruttuaria had written a treatise for novices that ac­knowledged joking as an unavoidable part of monastic life.47 Even the stern Cluniac monk Peter Damian revealed in his letters that he often felt guilty for laughing and joking under the pretense of spiritual delight.48 Modern medievalists, such as Jean Leclerq and Jacques Le Goff, have demonstrated how deeply a playful spirit gripped the cloister.49 I will touch on some of these more practical manifestations of laughter in my ­second chapter. For now, however, my concern is with theory rather than practice. How did monastic rules and writings discuss laughter? And what intellectual and spiritual associations did laughing take in monastic life? Historians have often discussed the disciplining of laughter in monastic rules.50 The usual starting point for these explorations has been the Rule of Saint Benedict (c.550), the rule of life adopted by the most populous monastic orders of the twelfth century. The Rule of Benedict’s condemnation of laughter most famously captured the imagination of Umberto Eco, who wrote a medieval detective novel 45  See, for example, the lampooning of the Cistercians by Walter Map and Gerald of Wales, which demonstrated great intimacy with the nuances of their rules and professed beliefs. This is discussed at length in David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: 940–1216 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1963), ch. 39, pp. 662–78. 46  Epistolae Cantuariensis, edited by William Stubbs (London: Rolls Series, 1865), p. 307. 47  John of Fruttuaria, Tractatus de Ordine Vitae et Morum Institutione, III “Adolescentium cum senibus conversationem ad profectum virtutis conducere,” PL vol. 184, col. 568A: Nam licet interdum honesta joca suavia sint; tamen ab ecclesiastica aberrant regula, quoniam quae in Scripturis sanctis non reperimus, quomodo usurpare possumus. Note that parts of this text have been re-edited in André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932), pp. 94–8. 48  “Sub specie namque spiritalis laetitiae,” Peter Damian, Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, vol. 3, Die Briefe der Deutschen Kaiserheit, edited by Kurt Reindel (Munich: MGH, 1983), n.138, p. 474. 49  Jacques Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages,” in A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 40–53; Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), pp. 173–5. Leclercq makes the argument that monks, as men of high sensitivity and learning, often enjoyed witty jokes and expressed themselves humorously, and he underlines the influence of the classical satirical tradition. He also makes the point that Bernard of Clairvaux often invented stories that were described as jucunde. This, however, may be reading too far—jucunde, after all, does not necessarily imply laughter. Le Goff ’s treatment, meanwhile, is exceptionally brief. 50 Gerhard Schmitz, “ ‘. . . quod rident homines, plorandum est.’ Der ‘Unwert’ des Lachens in monastich geprägten Vorstel lungen der Spätenike und des frühen Mittelalters,” Stadtverfassung Verfassungsstaat, Pressepolitick, edited by Franz Quarthal and Wilfried Setzler (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1980), pp. 3–15; Jacques Le Goff, “Le Rire dans les règles monastiques du Haut Moyen Âge,” Cahier du Centre du recherches historiques 3 (1989), pp. 1–14.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  27 on the subject.51 According to Benedict’s Rule, monks were forbidden from “coarse jests and idle words (scurrilitates vero vel verba otiose) that provoked laughter.”52 Benedict’s “tenth degree of humility” warned that monks should not be easily or quickly moved to laughing, while his eleventh advised monks to speak gently, humbly, and “without laughter at all.”53 As the Benedictine rule was the most widely used monastic rule in the twelfth century, this presentation of laughter as an obstacle to be eradicated from the monk’s life obviously had an enormous impact. Just as with the Glossa, however, Benedict’s Rule was often read through the lens of commentaries and interpretations, a few of which were rather flexible on laughter. Turning to the concordance of commentaries compiled by Benedict of Aniane (d.821), we find that they often distinguished between different types of laughter. The Rule of Paul and Stephen (c. late 500s) for instance prohibited only “immoderate laughter” (risus inmoderata), while the Regula Magistri (c. late 500s) condemned only laughter that is “excessive” (multus) or “thrown around” (excussus) in the cloister.54 Although Aniane’s collection featured some rules that totally ­outlawed laughter, such as the Rule of Saint Basil and the Regula Orientali, these were in the minority.55 Following in the same tradition, the abbot Smargadus of Saint-Mihiel (d.c.840) in his commentary on Benedict’s Rule only forbade the kind of joking or laughter “with immoderate extravagance” (ioci et risus inmoderata luxoria) that might “sow scandal among the brothers” (inter fratres nascuntur scandala).56 As laughter was a natural capacity of humans, Smaragdus clarified that rather than being prohibited it should be “kept in check” (subpresse). So long as laughter was done “honorably” (honeste), he admitted, then people could not entirely abandon it at all (non potest homo relinquere).57 This flexibility was also reflected in a number of alternative twelfth-century monastic rules. We might note that Robert of Arbrissel’s rule for the nuns of 51  See, for example, Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (Sand Diego: Harcourt, 1983), which has a plot that in many ways centers on the suppression of laughter in medieval monastic rules and life. Otherwise, the observation is made in I.  M.  Resnick, “ ‘Risus Monasticus’: Laughter and Medieval Culture,” Revue Bénédictine 97 (1987): pp. 90–100; Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages,” and Bießenecker, op cit. 52  Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of Saint Benedict, translated by Abbot Parry (Leominste: Gracewing, 1990), ch. 6, p. 23. 53  Rule of Saint Benedict, ch. 7, pp. 28–9. 54  Benedict of Aniane, Concordia Regularum, vol. 2, edited by Pierre Bonnerue (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 9, 5, p. 124; and 7, 20, p. 107. Note that the reference to the Regula Magistri is made despite Jacques Le Goff ’s claim that in that text, “of all the evil forms of expression that come from inside, laughter was the worst.” (“Laughter in the Middle Ages,” p. 46). Le Goff is correct, but does not stress how the laughter is modified – “risus multus vel excussus,” PL vol. 88, col. 959C. In every instance where laughter is mentioned in the Regula Magistri, it is given a specific context in this way. See col. 973B-C, “verbum vanum . . . risui aptum;” col. 974B, “promptum in risum;” and col. 1046A, “risu multo aut excusso.” 55  Concordia Regularum, 20, 2, p. 164, and 27, 8, pp. 222–3. 56  Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, Commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict, edited and translated by David Barry (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2007), p. 203; p. 224. 57 Smaragdus, Commentary, p. 227.

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28  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Fontevrault (c.1100) is silent on the matter of laughter, although the nuns were commanded to only use “necessary” speech (necessaria verba loquantur).58 Meanwhile the “Primitive Rule” of the Templar Order (c.1129) condemned laughter only in two highly specific circumstances. It was totally banned, first of all, for brothers engaging in conversations with the master after Compline.59 Otherwise, the rule reminded brothers not to laugh when they went quietly into the woods, for fear that the noise might irritate the wild animals.60 Although it is difficult to argue from silence, we might infer from the specificity of these two prohibitions that a lot of laughter was allowed in the margins of Templar monastic life. Rules are only part of the picture, however. Monastic communities were as much led by the theology of their major intellectuals, whose ideas about the meaning and practice of the regular life transformed monastic experience. Among these influential figures, the Benedictine, Anselm of Canterbury (d.1109), the Augustinian Canon, Hugh of St Victor (d.1141), the Cluniac, Peter the Venerable (d.1156), and the Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153) all studied laughter as a serious matter for discussion. Cited at different points in the works of Henry’s courtiers, these writers represent a gradual transition from monastic hostility to laughter, in the early twelfth century, to a theology of laughter as a potent manifestation of mystical grace and interior morality by the end of the 1100s. For Anselm, the most influential monastic writer active in England in the early twelfth century, bodily laughter was always something to be condemned.61 While he never gave the matter any sustained discussion, across his work he associated laughter with pride, foolishness, or else slack discipline. In his Oratio made to Saint Stephen, for instance, Anselm listed laughter among the acts of daily life that he felt would lead the soul to hell.62 In a letter of advice he sent to the young monk Herluin, Anselm warned him of people who laugh in a “worldly” way (mundi ridet), and advised the young man that, if he wanted to protect himself from eternal grief, tears were more effective than “false laughter” (falsum risum).63 And when he discussed laughter in a spiritual context, Anselm dismissed it as a generic form of sin. As he explained in one of his Meditationes, reflecting on the total absence of joy that prompted his search for God’s love, “my laughter is turned to grief ” (versus est in luctum risus meus).64 58  Robert of Arbrissel, Regula Sanctimonialium Fontis Ebraldi, PL vol. 162, col. 1079A. 59  Joannes Michaeliensis, Regula Templariorum, PL vol. 166, 17, col. 863C: “In illo colloquio scurrilitates et verba otiosa ac risum moventia omnino prohibemus.” Note that this section was mostly paraphrased from the Regula Magistri, PL vol. 88, col. 966A-B. 60  Joannes Michaeliensis, Regula Templariorum, 47, col. 868C. “Sine risu” appears under the rubric “Ut nullus feram arcu vel balista percutiat.” 61  On Anselm’s influence, see the recent collection of essays, Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy, edited by Giles E. M. Gaspar and Ian Logan (Durham: Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012). 62  Anselm of Canterbury, Opera Omnia, edited by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, 6 vols. (Stuttgart: Bad Cannstatt, 1984)), vol. 3, Orationes sive Meditationes, II, p. 51. 63 Anselm, Opera Omnia, vol. 3, Epistolae, Letter 8, pp. 110–11. 64 Anselm, Opera Omnia, vol. 3, Orationes sive Meditationes, II, p. 9.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  29 When Anselm spoke of a type of moral laughter, this was typically presented as non-bodily.65 Discussing contemplative devotion in his Proslogion, he suggested that laughter had a strictly figurative role in mystical ascent. When he was preparing for serious contemplation, Anselm said he felt an intense “joy in the mind” (gaudio mentis) a feeling he associated with the joy of immortal life in God, or what he called the jucunditate immortalitatis. Although he claimed that this feeling made him want to laugh out loud, he said that the sadness in his heart forced him to weep instead.66 While the joyful mind demanded expression in laughter, Anselm maintained that the groans (gemitu) of the heart alone should find an outlet through the body.67 It is an internal struggle that illustrates the limits of laughter’s spiritual capacity in Anselm’s mind. While he associated the idea of laughter with mystical ecstasy, he was anxious to avoid laughter itself. Even if it was stimulated by the purest of spiritual motives, he urged that the true monk should always suppress it. Joy in the life of monks remained a fraught issue throughout later twelfth-century monastic debates. After Anselm, the topic was explored further by the great theologian and canon regular, Hugh of St Victor (d.1141). Advising novices among his fellow Augustinian canons, Hugh recommended that they should always remain cheerful (hilarem), as this would help them better attend to the needs of others in the cloister.68 At a deeper theological level, Hugh emphasized the importance in monastic salvation of taking “cheer in higher things” (hilaritate superioribus). Through this state of joy, Hugh argued, young monks could be liberated from unthinking subjection, reforming themselves through a more heartfelt love of God.69 Yet overflowing with good cheer was not the same thing as laughing. In a commentary on Solomon, Hugh was emphatic that a monk’s spiritual joy should never allow him to “loosen the mind in laughter” (animum ad risum dissolvit), as this unleashed a frivolity that destroyed the “modesty of the cloister” (modestiae claustris).70 While maintaining that joy could be either good or bad depending on its source, Hugh argued that laughter was always “evil in

65  Albrecht Classen suggests that Anselm used humor for effect in his Letter 41. Albrecht Classen, “Introduction” to Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, Its Meanings, and Consequences, edited by Albrecht Classen, 1–114( Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), p. 43. 66 Anselm, Opera Omnia, vol. 1, Proslogion, I, p. 99. “Volebam ridere a gaudio mentis meae, et cogor rugire a gemitu cordis mei.” 67  The symbolic “Laughter of the heart” (risus cordis) was a tradition that pervaded a great many mystical writings in the twelfth century. Examples are William of St Thierry, Epistola ad fratres Monte Dei, I, 1, PL vol. 184, col. 309B, and Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote, “de compunctione ad eum [i.e., God] rideo.” Hildegard of Bingen, Liber vite meritorum, edited by A. Carlevaris (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), ch. 4, p. 12. Note that this laughter for Hildegard is strictly non-corporeal. In her Scivias, 2: 6, 66, she rails against the impiety of laughter. 68  Hugh of St Victor, De Institutione Novitiorum, ch. II, PL vol. 176, col. 927B. 69  Hugh of St Victor, De Institutione, ch. V, col. 929A. 70  Hugh of St Victor, In Salomnis Ecclesiasten Homiliae, Homilia VIII (Quod homo a veritate aufugit), PL vol. 175, cols.164C-169D. “[S]piritale gaudium nequaquam animum ad risum dissolvit.”

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30  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century every way” (risus omnimodo malus est).71 Cheerfulness stopped being acceptable, in Hugh’s mind, at the precise point that it burst beyond a smile.72 The great abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (d.1156), exemplified a very different tradition. In his letters Peter frequently described his fellow monks laughing, and often even endorsed their joking.73 Reading his correspondences, we get the impression that laughter was a routine and natural part of monastic life. Lamenting the death of the Cluniac prior Hugh of Crécy, for example, Peter told his fellow monks not to laugh together as they usually did, but rather to shed tears for his soul.74 Peter’s letters were at times exceptionally playful, cajoling his monastic charges into witty repartee. In a letter to Raymond, Count of Toulouse, Peter suggested that the good monk should try to mix laughter and joking in with his more serious behavior.75 Elsewhere, as Brian McGuire has observed, Peter joked with Nicholas, a monk of Clairvaux, about his change of monastic habit, urging his friend to pay back his witticisms “with interest.”76 Undeniably, Peter’s exchanges suggest a lively culture of monastic good cheer. But their flippancy, their epistolary form, and their personal direction meant they fell short of any serious or lucid monastic theology of laughter. It was only with the contemplative writing of Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153) that an earnest monastic philosophy of bodily laughter began to emerge. During one of his final sermons on the Song of Songs, written in the two years before his death, Bernard described laughter as one of the acts through which a monk could manifest interior grace. But importantly, this was laughter that could be enjoyed by the living. When a monk had reached a purity of mind in the present life, Bernard explained, a unique beauty would fill his heart. Of this beauty, Bernard said: It shines out, and by the brightness of its rays it makes the body a mirror of the mind, spreading through the limbs and senses so that every action, every word, look, movement and even laugh (if there should be laughter) radiates gravity and honor.77 71  Hugh of St Victor, In Salomnis, col. 165B. 72  The idea that a smile—and nothing further on the laughter spectrum—could express divine joy is an interesting one that deserves further exploration. Another example of this view from earlier twelfth-century writings is: Honorius of Autun, Elucidarium, PL vol. 172, col. 1150A-B. “Justi namque sibi bene conscii, et de futura spe certi, sunt vultu hilares . . . Mali autem de prava conscientia et cordis amaritudine sunt vultu nebuloso, et verbis et factis instabiles; risu immoderati . . .” 73 Peter the Venerable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable, edited by Giles Constable, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), Letter 111, pp. 285–6. 74  Letters of Peter the Venerable, vol. 1, Letter 135, p. 340. On Hugh of Crécy, see The Letters of Peter the Venerable, vol. 2, pp. 311–15. “[O]stendere non possumus, conridendo vel collaetando.” 75  Letters of Peter the Venerable, vol. 1, Letter 117, p. 310. “Iam decet ut nostris succedant seria ludis. Ut monachi comptus sit gravitate jocus.” Note: Giles Constable observes in a note on this page that Peter is here citing Horace, Sat., I, I, 27: “seria ludo.” 76  Cited in Brian McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 288–9, and 485–6. “Exspecto facetias istas nostra a te cum usura statim solvi.” On Nicholas of Clairvaux’s relationship with Peter the Venerable, see Constable’s notes: The Letters of Peter the Venerable, pp. 316–30. 77  Bernard of Clairvaux, Super Cantica Canticorum, Sermo 85: 11, in Bernhard von Clairvaux: Sämtliche Werke, edited by G. Winkler, vol. 6 (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1994), p. 642. “Porro effulgentem et

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  31 This position still had the ring of novelty in the early 1150s, as Bernard’s addition of “if there should be laughter” (si tamen risus) confirms. Yet as a piece of teaching for his Cistercian brethren this was a decisive new statement of laughter’s capacity to channel grace in the body.78 Bernard had taken a forceful logical step, arguing that if a monk was filled with an interior “luminosity” (effulgentem) then his acts must naturally reflect that state as well. Rather than actions determining a person’s morals, he stressed how morality preceded and thus determined the quality of a person’s deeds. By this gesture, laughter was tentatively unlocked from its strict associations with sin. So long as it came from a morally pure source, it could be seen as a legitimate expression of monastic devotion. Historians have occasionally questioned whether this passage contradicted Bernard’s wider philosophy of laughter. Jean-Claude Schmitt for example has drawn attention to the distinction between the idealized laughter in Bernard’s sermon on the Song of Songs and the starker condemnations he made in his earlier work, the Steps of Humility and Pride (c.1120s).79 In that program, which was aimed at younger monks to teach them discipline in the cloister, Bernard had described laughing as a sign that the individual had slipped into what he called the “third step of pride.” He warned that through giggling (cachinno) and laughing (risus) the monk became oblivious to the weight of his own sins, encouraging others to find faults in those around them.80 Bernard’s oscillation between praise and condemnation, in Schmitt’s view, depended on the context of the debate. While Bernard praised the virtues of laughter for the advanced monks who heard his sermons on the Song of Songs, he emphasized elementary discipline for the novices who heard the Steps. Building on this observation, Mette Bruun has suggested that we dismiss Bernard’s view in the sermon on the Song of Songs as an exception.81 Bernard’s true attitude to laughter, she has argued, was closer to his statement in the De Diversis, sermon 93: 1, where he declared that laughing was just as unseemly for  monks as running about in cities and villages.82 It is true that Bernard was veluti quibusdam suis radiis erumpentem mentis simulacrum corpus explicit, et diffundit per membra et sensus, quatenus omnis inde reluceat actio, sermo, aspectus, incessus, risus, si tamen risus, mixtus gravitate et plenus honesti.” This translation is from Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, vol. 4, translated by Irene Edmonds (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Costercian Publications, 1980), p. 207. 78  One possible precursor to Bernard of Clairvaux is the Benedictine theologian Rupert of Deutz, who declared that: “omnis risus eius erroneus est solum autem de visione dei et risus faciei eius praesentis plenitudinem habet et in veritate est nec enim obscurari vel auferri potest.” Commentaria in evangelium sancti Iohannis, edited by H. Haacke (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), Book 12, p. 687. It is not so clear, however, that Rupert believed this mystical laughter to be entirely physical. 79 Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 153–4. 80  Bernard of Clairvaux, De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, PL vol. 182, cols.964B-965A. 81 Mette  B.  Bruun, “Wandering Eyes, Muttering, and Frowns: Bernard of Clairvaux and the Communicative Implications of Gesture,” in Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication, edited by Steven Vanderputten (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 337–63, p. 358. 82  Bruun, “Wandering Eyes,” p. 358.

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32  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century especially sensitive to how monks presented themselves. But Bruun’s point is not borne out by the entirety of the particular passage of the De Diversis that she cites. A few lines later, Bernard went on to claim that “laughter is charity (charitas) when it is derived from cheerfulness (hilaris); it is delightful (laeta), so long as one does not become dissolved (dissoluta) in it.”83 What was most important for Bernard, again, was that the source of laughter dictated its moral worth. Ultimately there was no contradiction in Bernard’s laughing philosophy. Rather, we must appreciate his statements in the context of his wider spiritual anthropology. Stephen Jaeger has argued that Bernard conceived of monastic discipline in pointed contradiction to the Victorine school. Whereas Victorines, such as Hugh of St Victor, had been concerned with restraining outward behavior, the abbot of Clairvaux was more concerned with purifying the “inner man.”84 Bernard condemned laughter when it derived from what he considered impure inner motives. In situations where he felt that the inner man was pure, however, the abbot believed that even his laughter could express an overflowing of grace. And while it is true that Bernard condemned laughter more often than he encouraged it, he rarely did so without specifying the motive behind it. In an advisory letter to a converted nun, Bernard stressed that it was specifically her “immoderate” laughter (Risus immoderatior) that was unfitting for the cloistered life.85 And praising the exemplary spiritual figure Saint Malachy, Bernard did not write that the holy man never laughed, but rather that he was never “pushed to levity” through laughter.86 Throughout his work, Bernard never treated laughter as a fixed sign in itself. Instead, he indexed it to the inner spiritual life of the individual. Bernard’s views on laughter set a precedent that was cautiously adopted by all the most significant monastic theologians in the latter half of the twelfth century. This was particularly the case among his fellow Cistercians. For Bernard’s disciple William of St Thierry (d.1148), who converted to the Cistercian order in later life, laughter eventually became a sign of supreme spiritual virtue. At first William insisted on laughter’s non-corporeality. Good monks should daily offer up to God the “laughter of their hearts” (risum . . . cordis), he suggested in his treatise on love.87 He advised members of the Carthusian Order to adopt this very same figurative laughter at the outset of their mystical ascent to God,88 and reminded monks in his sermons that divine joy was felt in a “joyful heart” (iubilo cordis) and not 83  Bernard of Clairvaux, De Diversis, Sermo 93, PL vol. 183, col. 716D. “Charitas enim risus est, quia hilaris est. Laeta quidem, non tamen dissoluta.” 84  C.  Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideas in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 272. 85  Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistolae, 114: 3, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 826. 86  Bernard of Clairvaux, Vita Malachie, ch. 19: 43. Cited in Gerald of Wales, Opera, 3: 348, p. 18. This passage also cited in Stephen Jaeger, Envy of Angels, p. 273. 87  William of St Thierry, De natura et dignitate amoris, edited by P. Verdeyen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 24, p. 196. 88  William of St Thierry, Epistola ad fratres Monte Dei, I, 1, PL vol. 184, col. 309B.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  33 expressed with the mouth (oris).89 Ultimately, however, William came to prefer that holy grace was expressed in the form of a smile rather than a laugh: Let him strive at this stage to embrace purity of heart, cleanness of body . . . to bring forth not lust of the heart by laughing but grace by a gentle smile.90

Touched by Bernard, William was nevertheless caught between two stools. While preserving older monastic associations between bodily laughter and lust, he was also coming around to the idea that interior qualities could give new shape to outward behavior. We can find a similar pattern in the work of the most influential English monastic writer of the later twelfth century, Aelred of Rievaulx (d.1167).91 As with Bernard, Aelred cautioned those in the earlier stages of their monastic lives to avoid laughter altogether. His advice for young monks, the Twelve Abuses of the Cloister, named laughter as the “most pitiable among all the sins” (miserabilior inter alias abusiones).92 In his Instructions for the Imprisoned he advised anchoresses to never mix their speech with laughter,93 and in his preaching he implored monks to love mourning more than laughing.94 Yet in the context of his more ascetic writing, Aelred cast laughter as a virtue.95 Glossing Isaac’s name in a sermon, Aelred wrote that it heralded “the laughter which is neither buffoonish nor spurned by jokes (non significat scurrilitatem nec iocum), but rather the laughter of ineffable joy (ineffabile gaudium) that we shall have with God.” This may sound like a classic case of laughter deferred until paradise. But, underlining the bodily dimension of this delightful laughter, Aelred added, “Of this joy, we ought to have one part in the present life . . . [derived from] the hope we should have in God, and the promises he will fulfill.”96

89  William of St Thierry, Exposito super Cantica Canticorum, PL vol. 180, col. 514C. “Gaudium hoc non est in risu oris, sed in iubilo cordis.” 90  William of St Thierry, De natura, 8, p. 183. “Studeat etiam habere hic talis, et amplectatur cordis puritatem, corporis munditiam . . . non ridendo prodere cordis lasciviam, sed leniter subridendo gratiam.” Translation from: William of St Thiery, The Nature and Dignity of Love, translated by Thomas X. Davis (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1981), p. 60. 91  For a discussion of Aelred’s view on spiritual joy more generally, see John R. Sommerfeldt, Aelred of Riexvaulx: Pursuing Perfect Happiness (New York: Newman Press, 2005), p. 47. 92  London, BL MS Cotton Cleopatra B VI, f.196r: “Sed risus et cachinnationes et ructus ingurgitati ventis, miserabilior inter alias abusiones hec abusio.” 93  Aelred of Rievaulx, De Institutione Inclusarum, CCCM, 1, edited by C.  H.  Talbot (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), pp. 637–682), ll; pp. 23–31. 94  Aelred of Rievaulx, Sermones, CCCM, 2B, edited by G. Raciti (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), Sermo 53 (coll. Dunelmensis), p. 45; and Sermo XXIV, In Festo Omnium Sanctorum, III, PL vol. 195, col. 351A. 95  For a discussion of Aelred’s integration of joy in the spiritual life, see Sommerfeldt, Aelred of Riexvaulx, especially p. 47. 96  Aelred of Rievaulx, Sermones, CCCM, 2B, Sermo 83 (e sermonario Lincoliense), p. 344: “Iste risus non significat scurrilitatem nec iocum, sed quoddam ineffabile gaudium quod nos habebimus cum Deo. De isto gaudio debemus habere unam partem in ista uita, quia debemus gaudere in illa spe quam debemus habere in Deum et in illis promissionibus quas promisit nobis.”

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34  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Another English Cistercian, Isaac of Stella (d.1169), carried this logic forward even further. Suggesting behavioral codes for novices, Isaac placed laughter first in a long list of profligate vices, such as trifling, gluttony, and drunkenness.97 More often than not, Isaac backed up his condemnations of laughter with the famous example that “Christ never laughed.” But when he offered advice for the contemplative life, he expanded on laughter’s capacity for expressing mystical wisdom. In a moving passage, Isaac described how laughter would come to those who, fleeing the “oblivion” (oblivionem) of the world by entering the cloister, would receive “the full joy that nobody can take away” (gaudium plenum, quod nemo tollet a te).98 A friend to Thomas Becket during his struggle with King Henry, Isaac was also fond of the image of laughing defiance.99 In an aspirational sermon, he argued that the ideal Christian should be spurred by a love of poverty to “repel the world with a laugh” (mundum ridentem respuat).100 By the last decades of the twelfth century, this divine bodily laughter gained momentum in monastic theology. The Cistercian Geoffrey of Clairvaux (d.c.1188), a monk from Auxerre who helped negotiate King Henry’s reconciliation with the pope in 1167 and 1168, took the concept further. Like Bernard, Geoffrey’s elementary homiletic condemned the Christian who “sat apart from the others laughing at them, though he himself was even more laughable (ipse quoque ridendus).”101 Yet Geoffrey argued that in the act of contemplation laughter in fact announced the presence of God. The laughter of Saint Lawrence the Martyr, he said, was a  sign that God had given the saint holy strength.102 And in his continuation of  Bernard’s unfinished sermons on the Song of Songs, Geoffrey explained that laughter had a unique capacity for expressing spiritual joy.103 Neither made by human power nor learned by teaching, this laughter derived entirely from spiritual inspiration. What, indeed, could be more proper than that laughter which is said to come from a contemplation that moves beyond [contemplationis excessus]? With this, the mind is seized by an abundance of joy, through which, instead of being loosened into foolishness, it becomes spiritually liquefied [spiritaliter liquefacit]. 97  Isaac of Stella, Sermons, edited by Anselm Hoste, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1967), Sermon 2, pp. 106–8. 98  Isaac of Stella, Sermons, vol. 1, Sermon 7, p. 207. 99  The Bishop of Poitiers, John Bellesmains, named Isaac as a “common friend” in a letter to Becket.The Correspondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1162–1170, edited and translated by Anne J. Duggan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)., vol. 1, p. 105. 100  Isaac of Stella, Sermons, vol. 1, Sermon 3, p. 126–8. “. . . per amorem pauperitatis mundum ridentem respuat.” 101  Geoffrey of Clairvaux, Declamationes de colloquio Simonis cum Jesu, PL vol. 184, XXV “De innaturali et inexplebii fame,” cols.454C-455A. “Quintus saeorsum positus ridebat caeteros, ipse quoque ridendus, et maxime.” 102  Geoffrey of Clairvaux, Declamationes, LVIII, “Quid sit hoc centuplum,” col. 474A-B. 103  On the circulation of Geoffrey’s commentary, see C. J. Holdsworth, “John of Ford and English Cistercian Writing, 1167–1214,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series 11 (1961): pp. 117–36.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  35 Moreover, this kind of laughter is not made by human industry, but rather by a divine visitation. It is not learned by instruction, but is given by anointment.104

This was a concept of monastic laughter wrapped up with an intense spiritual power. Using the Latin term excessus (“moving beyond”), Geoffrey associated this contemplative laughter with the highest heights of mystical experience.105 And by emphasizing the “spiritual liquefication” (spiritaliter liquefacit), he connected it with the final annihilation of the ego that marked the apex of mystical experience in the works of Bernard and William of St Thierry. Rather than being a stepping stone on the way to mystical wisdom, divine laughter was now finding a place at the very pinnacle of monastic experience. We can also find this supreme laughter appearing in the works of Cluniac and Carthusian monks in the later 1100s. One example is the Scottish Carthusian Adam of Dryburgh (d.1212), a monk known to Henry II’s sometime close associate Bishop Hugh of Lincoln. Adam described an “eternal laughter,” one that was “longed for by the contemplative soul” as he prepared for a mental ascent to God (ut sit in anima devota, quae ad aeternae exsultationis risum festinat).106 The Cluniac Gilbert Foliot (d.1187), a black monk who was later made Bishop of London by Henry II, went even further. In his exposition of the Song of Songs, Gilbert described a type of perfect laughter that brought the soul to the point of union with Christ: In this life, this is the laughter of the faithful soul. It comes when, with a clean conscience, a perfect heart, and an abundance of chaste love, he learns to follow the Lord Jesus to the highest, extending his mind’s kiss to both the human and the divine.107

104  Geoffrey of Clairvaux, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, edited by Ferruccio Gastadelli, vol. 1 (Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1974), p. cxxxvii. “Quid enim rectius quam risus dicitur ­contemplationis excessus, cum interim gaudii plenitudo animam raptam supra se non dissolvit inaniter, sed spiritaliter liquefacit? Ceterum huiusmodi risus sicut humana non efficitur industria sed visitatione divina, sic non discitur eruditione sed unctione magistra.” This discussion survives in a unique fragment from a manuscript in Troyes, and was attributed to Geoffrey by Gastadelli, who drew on an internal reference in one of his other sermons. The excerpt (from Troyes MS 1087, ff.108v–109v) is transcribed and discussed in Geoffrey of Clairvaux, Expositio, pp. cxxxiv–cxxxvii. The sermon where Geoffrey refers to this work is “Sermo ad Cartusienses in eorum capitulo generali,” and can be found in Gastadelli, vol. 2, p. 404. 105  On this use of “excessus” in Cistercian discourse, see Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1994), p. 212. 106  Adam of Dryburgh, Liber de quadripartito exercito cellae, VI, PL vol. 153, col. 812A. “. . . ut sit in anima devota, quae ad aeternae exsultationis risum festinat.” For more on Adam, see Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 433–4. For Adam as author of the Liber de quadripartito, as attested to by the discovery of the Witham account, see Christopher Holdsworth, “Dryburgh, Adam of (c.1140-1212),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 107  Gilbert Foliot, Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, I: 1, PL vol. 202, col. 1157A-B. “In hac quidem vita, fidelis animae risus hic est, quod conscientia munda, corde perfecto, amoris integritate plenissima, se novit in alta prosequi Dominum Jesum, et suae mentis osculum in eius humana simul et divina porrigere.”

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36  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century The “mind’s kiss” (mentis osculum), which recalls the very first line of the Canticles, is a curious new metaphor for moral laughter. Along with moral purity, Gilbert was keen to emphasize the importance of learning as something that would shape and soften this kiss. This perfect laughter was very distinct, he stressed, from the laughter “mixed with pain” (risus . . . dolori commistus), which came from those who lacked higher understanding.108 Undoubtedly, however, the strongest exponents of mystical laughter were the Cistercian monks.109 By the end of the century, this monastic sea change was encapsulated by the abbot John of Ford (d.1214).110 Although John still ac­knowledged laughter’s sinful connotations, he was more passionate about its mystical power.111 Despite the long tradition that had exalted weeping over laughing in Christian writing, John praised the laughter of Saint Lawrence the Martyr for expressing a zeal that “outstripped even tears” in its spiritual luminosity. “Lamentation does not shatter it, weeping does not conciliate it,” John wrote, associating the martyr’s laugh with an “everlasting fire” that “never slacks, even for a moment.”112 Angelic laughter, which John called “the laughter of the blessed spirits” (beatorum . . . spir­ ituum risus), was for him the kind of laughter that “befits those awe-inspiring citizens of heaven, friends of so great and majestic a God.”113 Far from being the non-bodily laughter of the heart, this was a robustly bodily phenomenon. Where it was “temperate” (sobrius), made in “grave exultation” (exultation gravis), and “holy joy” (iubilatio sancta), this angelic monastic laughter would express the final culmination of spiritual power on earth.114 108  Gilbert Foliot, Expositio, col. 1157A-B. “. . . hic vero risus adhuc dolori commistus est . . . cum, quem corde sequitur, se nondum apprehendere novit.” 109  A great deal of Pseudo-Bernardine Cistercian literature also espoused these similar views of laughter. One example is the Soliloquium, which advocated laughter as a trait of the ideal monk, so long as it was made proceeding humbly, with the desire only of pleasing Jesus. “Risus ejus semper modestus, incessus humilis: nil aliud est quod cupiat, quam ut Jesu placeat.” Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Soliloquium, 11, PL vol. 184, col. 1164B. See also Meditationes piissimae de cognitione humanae conditionis, III “De dignitate animae, et vilitate corporis,” PL vol. 184, col. 491B. 110  On John of Ford, see Holdsworth, “John of Ford,” pp. 117–36. Holdsworth comments that John seems to have taken much of his inspiration from St Gregory, Anselm of Canterbury, Richard of St Victor, as well as the preceding Cistercian tradition (p. 124). 111  For John’s description of the perpetually sighing and weeping figure of Charity, who sighs at those who “sad to say, can only laugh, and so prepare themselves for inconsolable grief,” see John of Ford, Sermons on the Final Verses of the Song of Songs, translated by Wendy Mary Beckett, vol. 4 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), Sermon 55, pp. 117–19. 112  John of Ford, Sermons, vol. 7, Sermon 106, pp. 72–3. Latin: John of Ford, Super extremum par­ tem Cantici Canticorum sermones CXX, vol. 2, edited by Edmond Mikkers and Hilary Costello (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970), vol. 2, p. 720: “Quid enim aemulatione illa durius aut vehementius excogitari potuit, quae suos ausa est ridere carnifices, longaque examination excocta ad solidum iam ignes non timuit, quoniam ut testa exaruit?” 113  John of Ford, Sermons, vol. 7, Sermon 118, pp. 223–4. Latin: John of Ford, Super extremum, vol. 2, p. 798: “Beatorum vero spirituum risus sobrius, exultatio gravis, congratulatio pia, iubilatio sancta, qualis denique decet tam reverendos cives illos, tremendae illius maiestatis amicos.” 114  Note that John also explored this same idea in other genres of writing. In his vita of Wulfric of Haselbury he described the hermit laughing wisely at a man who wanted, by a miracle, to speak French as well as English. John of Ford, Life of Wulfric of Haselbury, edited by Maurice Bell, Somerset Records Society 47 (Froome: Butler & Tanner, 1933), p. 123.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  37 This increasing acceptance of bodily laughter within monastic thought must be situated within the broader changes taking place in twelfth-century cloistered life. Pioneered in part by Cistercian monks such as Bernard of Clairvaux, this was a period when the body began to occupy a more prominent place in monastic theology. As Damien Boquet has explored in his study of Aelred of Rievaulx, across the 1100s there was a movement away from an Augustinian anthropological conception, which had typically abnegated the spiritual value of the body, towards an affective spirituality that recognized the body as a vital support for spiritual perfection.115 What was once only a metaphor of interior holy joy was converted, by the later 1100s, into an out-loud affirmation of bodily divine presence. As mystical laughter became grounded in the monk’s body, and as the very physicality of devotion grew emphatically more important in the cloister, so laughter came to resound with the heights of spiritual enlightenment.

Satire The writers at Henry II’s court were also immensely keen to show off their ­knowledge of ancient Latin and Greek. When he told an anecdote about the king, Gerald of Wales could not resist transplanting a passage from Valerius Maximus onto the episode.116 Walter Map dedicated an entire book of his De Nugis Curialium to a pseudo-classical epistle, and littered his work with knowing references to classical Latin works.117 Most copious of all was John of Salisbury, whose Policraticus contains more than a thousand citations from classical authors.118 Among this circle, arguably the most influential literary figures were the Roman satirists, Horace and Juvenal.119 This was, after all, a time when the teaching of satire was making a resurgence in twelfth-century schools, and when writers such as Walter Map were beginning to produce neo-classical satirical works of their own.120 With this satirical renaissance came another distinct idea of laughter, one 115  Damien Boquet, L’Ordre de l’affect au Moyen Âge. Autour de l’anthropologie d’Ailred de Rievaulx (Caen: Publications du CRAHM, 2005), pp. 119–49. 116  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, p. 63. 117 Walter Map, De nugis curialium, edited by M.  R.  James, Christopher  N.  L.  Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), see for the epistle: Dist.III. 118  John’s exceptional copiousness is referenced in James Jerome Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 111. 119  These authors’ satirical works are among the works referenced in extant curricula from twelfthcentury schools. See the syllabi of Alexander Neckham and Conrad of Hirsau in Ernst  R.  Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 49–50. Also, Olsen enumerates these works among the highest in a list that illustrates how widely circulated manuscripts of classical works were in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Birger Munk Olsen, “The Production of the Classics in the Eleventh and the Twelfth Centuries,” in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, edited by Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Margaret M. Smith (Leiden: Anderrson-Lovelace and the Red Gull Press, 1996), pp. 1–17, p. 17. 120  For instance, one scholar has identified the later twelfth century as the aetas Horitiana, such was the popularity of Horace. Olsen, “The Production of the Classics,” p. 15.

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38  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century specifically relating to social ethics. As satire laughed at hypocrisy and vice, it had the effect of legitimating laughter as a form of moral social corrective. It is not for nothing that John of Salisbury called Horace “the moral poet.”121 As Bernhard Bischoff has argued, John was one of many twelfth-century writers who looked to the Roman satirists as preachers of an essentially Christian morality.122 In fact, classical satire was often cited to complicate the very same theological debates about laughter that we have been surveying throughout this chapter. For Horace (d.8 bc), laughter could lead people to goodness and truth. Perhaps most representative is a line from his first Satire that twelfth-century writers were fond of citing, “ridentem dicere verum,” or “through laughing, one can tell the truth.”123 Expanding on these hermeneutic implications throughout his work, Horace argued that laughter had the power to reveal truths that were otherwise invisible. As he wrote, ridiculous things could cut “hard knots more forcefully and effectively than gravity.”124 With this power to reveal, however, came great responsibility. Horace insisted that good humor should always carry the weight of a ­serious message. He contrasted, for example, the merits of wit and vulgarity. “It is not enough,” he said, “to make your hearer grin with laughter, (though even in that there is some merit). You need brevity, so that the thought may run on . . . you need a style now serious, often jocose (modo tristi, saepe iocoso).”125 Illustrating this principle further, Horace recounted how Persius won a judicial assembly over to his side with a pun. It was a quip that cleverly underlined Persius’s own noble family heritage. By Horace’s logic, Persius’s laughter worked so well as he was able to make a serious point even more powerful through the form of the joke.126 When Horace denounced laughter, by contrast, he complained of its lack of weight or principle. Describing the laughter of treacherous backbiters, he denounced them for “inventing what they never saw.”127 If laughter was made for its own sake, then by Horace’s reckoning it was a waste of time. Another essential qualification of good satirical laughter for Horace was that it appealed to a truth that transcended subjective opinion. “Why do you laugh?” he 121  John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, I, ch. 4. 122  Bernhard Bischoff, “Living with the Satirists,” in Classical Influences on European Culture, AD 500–1500, edited by R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 90. 123 Horace, Satires, I: 1, l.24. “quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? Ut pueris olim dant crustula blandi doctores, elementa velint ut discere prima.” This phrase is repeated, for example, in John of Salisbury, Policraticus, sive de nugis curialium et vestigis philosophorum, edited by Clement C. J. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), Book 8: ch. 11, vol. 2, p. 301; Peter of Celle, The Letters of Peter of Celle, edited and translated by Julian Haseldine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), Letter 170, p. 657. 124 Horace, Satires, I: 10, l. “Ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnas plerumue secat res.” 125 Horace, Satires, I: X, l.7–15: “Ergo non satis est risu diducere rictum auditoris; et est quaedam tamen hic quoque virtus: est brevitate opus, ut currat sentential . . . et sermone opus est modo tristi, saepe iocoso.” 126 Horace, Satires, I: VII: “Persius exponit causam; ridetur ab omni conventu; laudat Brutum ­laudatque cohortem . . .” 127 Horace, Satires, I: IV, l.81: “Absentem qui rodit amicum . . . qui captat risus hominum famamque dicacis, fingere qui non visa potest, commissa tacere qui nequit.”

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  39 asked the reader in his first Satire, “simply switch the names, and the subject of the ridicule is yourself.”128 Laughter in this sense was meant to reflect an image of reality, one unmitigated by the biases of any individual. It is in this connection that Horace considered the laughter of the sovereign. He described how Caesar judged two different offensive verses according to the quality of the laughter they provoked. Although the two passages were both equally illegal according to Roman law, Horace said that if one mocked those deserving of invective, “the legal process would be canceled with laughter.”129 With a view to finding truth beyond the confines of procedure, the king turned to laughter to enact an otherwise inaccessible justice. The Satires of Juvenal (fl. c.100 ad) were more directly concerned with hypocrisy. In particular, he attacked falsity and affectation with a cutting and sardonic humor. Characteristically, Juvenal’s second Satire described a doctor who laughed when he discovered the smooth body of a man who had claimed to be masculine and hairy.130 Feigned masculinity was also at issue when Juvenal mocked the “delusions” of a wife who had pretended to be a man.131 Although his Satires tended to laugh down from a lofty position, Juvenal claimed that this was the prerogative of exceptional wisdom. His final Satire described Heraclitus and Democritus, who were famous for constantly weeping and laughing respectively. As Juvenal said, “Democritus long ago found occasion for laughter in all human discourse, and his wisdom reveals that the greatest men, those destined to set the highest examples, may still be born in a . . . country of muttonheads.”132 According to Juvenal, Democritus laughed equally at “the cares of the crowd” as much as “their pleasures,” exemplifying his exalted perspective on their world. With his wise and relativizing laughter, his cynical gaze searched beyond immediate circumstances. This was essentially the view shared by Juvenal himself. Despite his biting derision, he ultimately reiterated the claims of Horace, conceiving laughter as a force that could transcend the self and illuminate a higher truth in the process. How were Horace and Juvenal absorbed into twelfth-century intellectual discourse? As Suzanne Reynolds has illuminated, a number of surviving medieval Horace manuscripts demonstrate that the Satires were used to teach grammar.133 And it is certainly true that many glosses on Horace were rather straightforward, 128 Horace, Satires, I: 1, l.68. “Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.” This phrase is repeated in William of Conches, A Dialogue on Natural Philosophy (Dragmaticon Philosophiae), edited and translated by Italo Ronca and Matthew Curr (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), IV, 1: 1;, Peter the Chanter. Verbum Adbreviatum, edited by M.  Boutry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 2: 6. 129 Horace, Satires, II: 1, l.83. “Esto, siquis mala; sed bona siquis iudice condiderit laudatus Caesare? Siquis obprobis dignum latraverit, integer ipse? Solventur risu tabulae, tu missus abibis.” 130 Juvenal, Satires, II, l.13: “sed podice levi caeduntur tumidae medico ridente mariscae.” 131 Juvenal, Satires, VI, l.254. 132 Juvenal, Satires, X, l.28. 133 Suzanne Reynolds, “Glossing Horace: Using the Classics in the Medieval Classroom,” in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, edited by Claudine  A.  ChavannesMazel and Margaret M. Smith (London: Red Gull Press, 1996), pp. 103–18, pp. 109–10.

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40  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century suggesting they were used for simple Latin comprehension in schools.134 Yet a number of more sophisticated twelfth-century manuscript commentaries also indicate a lively moral discussion of satirical laughter. A manuscript in the British Library, made by a certain Richard the German (fl.c.1180), glossed Horace’s “ridentem dicere verum” in a way that engaged with its deeper implications. “Though it is possible to say the truth through laughing,” Richard wrote, “by bitter play we seek, instead, serious things” (tamen amaro ludo queremus id est serio).135 Glossing a later passage, Richard insisted that Horace’s laughter at Lucilius was not “badly done,” as the words were said playfully (ludendo dico), meaning they could be digested without being harmful or “vituperative” (vituperando).136 According to the writer of the popular twelfth-century Horatian gloss, the Proposerat commentary, laughing out loud could be a good way of drawing attention to the primary vices of others.137 Rather than reading Horace’s ideas passively, these twelfth-century commentators put his moralizing philosophy of laughter in contact with current Christian discourses of morals. Juvenal’s laughter took on some more explicitly Christian dimensions. In two separate twelfth-century Parisian manuscripts of Peter the Chanter’s Verbum Adbreviatum, a popular work of moral theology, a marginal gloss cites Juvenal. Specifically, the satirist is invoked at the point in the main text that discusses Christ’s laughter.138 Alongside Peter’s argument that “an interior spiritual delight . . . could be expressed through laughter” (interiore laetitia . . .in opera ridendi monstrare possit), the gloss quoted Juvenal’s ninth Satire. One can detect in a sickly body the secret torments of the soul, as also its joys: the face takes on the stamp of either.139

Juvenal’s satirical trajectory was here intersecting with emerging Christian ideas about the relationship between laughter and a purified interiority. Just as true joy could be detected in the face, the glossator turned to Juvenal to support the claim that true laughter reflected a morally ordered interior. Although it is a simple gloss, it illuminates the complex interconnectedness of different ideas about laughter

134  For instance, London, BL MS Harley 3534, which has a gloss on Horace’s first Satire that simply rephrases the “ridentem dicere verum” in a more facile wording: “Album panem poma et cetera blandimenta blandus magister dat pueris ut libentius discant elementa id est primas litteras,” f.69r. 135  London, BL MS Royal 15 B. VII, f.10r. “Et quamquam ridens vera posset dicere, tamen amaro ludo queremus id est serio . . .” 136  London, BL MS Royal 15 B.  VII, f.22r. “Dicamque aliquis male facius quod ita reprehendius lucilium. Contra hoc. Non male facio quia haec que dico non sunt timenda illi, quia ludendo dico, et quam talia sunt haec quam neque in aliquam ede sonant ne carpa id est aliquis iudex vituperando certas mecum.” 137  Paris, BN Lat, 5137, f.42r: “Quinquid et istis in libus viciis rides ergo debes de magnis ridere viciis.” 138  Note that Horace was cited a little further down in the same passage. Verbum Adbreviatum, I: 66. 139  This piece of marginalia was transcribed from MS Paris BN Lat. 3245A, and also from Paris BN Lat. 15101 by M. Boutry in Peter the Chanter, Verbum Adbreviatum, Textus Prior, p. 379 and p. 790. The passage from Juvenal is: Satires, 9, 16–20.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  41 and power in the later twelfth century. Not only were satirists appropriated for moral purposes, but moral readings also came to inflect the way satires were experienced too. The Bishop of Chartres, Peter of Celle (d.1183), embodied this connection in his personal writing. A keen reader of Horace, Peter absorbed and repeated his maxim of “telling the truth through laughter.”140 In his correspondence with John of Salisbury, he described especially how moderate joking and laughter could remain within the bounds of good Christian conduct.141 It is particularly revealing how Peter’s language (especially his use of decurrit, which echoes the “percurrit” of the famous passage in Horace’s first satire), was infused by the style of Horace: When I saw your letter my heart was filled with rejoicing, my mouth with laughter. You have indeed mixed jokes with serious matters, but moderate ones and without detriment to dignity and modesty. Your witticisms are not fanged, your jokes not cheap. Your speech runs along [decurrit] like that which one minute touches the clouds with its head, the next lowers its face to the earth. This finds favor in my eyes, it will stay with me and will be by me the whole night.142

Peter was particularly inspired by Horace’s combination of seria and ludo, the idea of mixing jocularity with sincerity to heighten its impact. When his friend’s joking “touched the clouds,” Peter rationalized it as both comic relief and an appeal to weighty truth. Not only was laughter useful, but it could be delightful too. Roman satirists also had a resounding impact on literary ideas, shaping the program of the twelfth-century satirical boom. Here the moralizing of Horace and Juvenal were redirected against royal and ecclesiastical power. As Henry of Huntingdon explained, poetic laughter was a tool to reprove the proud, even those of the highest station. “I laugh when I see the king’s head held so high, I try in vain to summon back those who follow him.”143 The Architrenius, a long mocking poem by John de Hauteville (fl.1184), echoed Juvenal’s laughter at hypocrisy. In a passage dealing with sycophantic courtiers, for instance, John satirized those who “laughed when their masters laughed and wept when they wept.”144 Most 140  “Ridendo tamen verum dixisti” Peter wrote in a letter to John of Salisbury in 1164. Letters of Peter of Celle, 170, p. 657. 141  On this correspondence, see Ronald  E.  Pepin, “Amicitia Jocosa: Peter of Celle and John of Salisbury,” Florilegium, vol. 5 (1983), pp. 140–56. 142  Letters of Peter of Celle, 63, p. 301, (c.1147–1162). “Ut vidi litteras tuas cor meum iubilo, os meum impletum est risu. Miscuisti siquidem iocos seriis, sed temperatos et sine detrimento dignationis et verecundie. Sales tui sine dente sunt, ioci sine vilitate. Sic decurrit oratio tua tanquam illa que ­aliquando nubes capite tangit aliquando vultum in terra demittit. Invenit hec gratiam in oculis meis, mecum manebit et apud me tota nocta erit.” Translation by Haseldine, p. 302. 143  Henry of Huntingon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, edited and translated by Diana Greenway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 786–7. “Rideo dum video reges sic colla ferentes, Lugeo dum studeo frustra revocare sequentes.” 144  Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, edited and translated by Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 108–11. At p. 254, Wetherbee comments on how the opening words of Johannes’s Book One (Velificatur Athos) echo words in Juvenal’s tenth satire.

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42  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century moral of all was Walter of Châtillon (d.1180), who dedicated the bulk of his own satirical works to moral criticism of Church authority. Walter explained that he was careful to avoid jokes that might “pervert clean minds” among the laity.145 At points, admittedly, medieval satirists perhaps blurred the boundary between moralizing and plain spite. Peter of Blois (d.1211) complained about the multitude in his day that spoke “spurious insults with a laugh” (falsa probra cum risu) and justified themselves with quotations “picked like flowers, from the books of Cicero, Seneca, Terence, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal.”146 Nevertheless, the ethical power of the classical satirical poets had for the most part become a strong motivator for comic writers. As Martin Aurell has underlined, the ethics of satirists like Horace also ­contributed to the savoir-faire of writers at Henry II’s court.147 Key to this sensibility was knowing when to laugh and when to remain quiet. As Walter Map noted with admiration, King Henry was too “courtly” ( facetus) to be amused by a bare-bottomed Cistercian monk.148 It was also essential to be able to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable targets of satire. In Chapter 3 I will go on to explore how writers at Henry’s court used these positions on laughter to frame both their social commentary and their own self-image. For now, however, it is enough to stress how sensitive twelfth-century writers were to the uses and abuses of Roman satire. While they recognized that satire was a valuable tool of moral rebuke, they knew all too well that satirical laughter could also be a self-serving and cruel weapon. This fear only sharpened their sense that, in moments of truly revelatory laughter, uncomfortable or otherwise inaccessible truths might suddenly become visible.

Philosophy When philosophers encountered laughter in the twelfth century it was normally in the context of logical arguments about human properties. The issue, as it was commonly cited, was that the ability to laugh (risus capax) was an inherent property of humanity. In dialectical terms this meant that laughter could be used to define the human being. Ultimately this idea derived from Aristotle, who had written that among living beings only humans are capable of laughter.149 But in medieval 145  Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, edited by Marvin Colker (Padua: Antenore, 1978), I, 2: “In conventu laicorum reor esse non decorum preferre ridicula, ne sermone retundamus aut exemplo pervertamus mentes sine macula.” 146  Peter of Blois, Libellus de arte dictandi rhetorice, in Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English Artes Dictandi and Their Tradition, edited by Martin Camargo (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), pp. 45–87, at pp. 67–8. “Excerpant sibi quasi quosdam flosculos a libris Tulli, Senece, Terencii, Oracii, Persii et Iuvenalis.” 147  Martin Aurell, Le chevalier lettré: Savoir et conduite de l’aristocracie aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 2011), p. 327. 148  Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, I: 25, p. 62. 149 Aristotle, On the Properties of the Animals, 3: 10. Curiously, the only other animal Aristotle applies laughter to is the heron.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  43 thought the idea remained in circulation thanks to two cornerstone works of logical philosophy. On the one hand, it was mentioned in the popular paraphrase of Aristotle’s Categories, the Categoriae Decem, attributed to Augustine.150 On the other, it was referenced in Porphyry’s brief but incredibly influential work the Isagoge, known to medieval intellectuals through a translation made by Boethius. While in the earlier Middle Ages the idea of the risus capax was mostly circulated via the remote works of Alcuin of York and Isidore of Seville,151 by the time of Henry II it seems to have penetrated all echelons of educated society.152 This was no doubt due in part to the popular impact of Porphyry’s work.153 But while esteemed intellectuals referenced the idea in philosophical treatises,154 what is striking is that the risus capax was also discussed widely at the very lowest levels of education. The Fallacies Londiniensis, for instance, an elementary grammar text book from the later twelfth century, taught students to reason with the nonsense syllogism: “Whatever laughs is a man. But the meadow laughs. So the meadow is a man.”155 Poets commonly described flowers or fields as “laughing” when they were in full bloom, and this play on words would have immediately made sense to students who had spent their morning filling their heads with Virgil and Ovid. Secure enough to be manipulated in jest, the risus capax had apparently by the mid-1100s become a robust and widely known concept of laughter. Despite its ubiquity, it is curious that this idea of laughter as a natural human property had not been such an important issue in the first half of the twelfth

150  Categoria Decem, ch. 2. To illustrate the circulation of this work in twelfth-century England, I have quoted this text from a twelfth-century English manuscript: London, BL MS Add. 47679, f.11r. See also, for discussions of the risus capax, f.5r, and f.9v. For a discussion of the circulation of the Catogriae Decem, see John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 16. 151  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, PL vol. 82, Book 2, 25, col. 143A; and Book 2, 29, col. 149A; Alcuin of York, De Dialectica, PL vol. 101, ch. 11, cols.963A-964C. 152  Note that John of Salisbury cites “hominis esse risibile” in his Historia Pontificalis. John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 34. Gerald of Wales, too, writes in his Topographica Hibernica that human nature cannot be ascribed to werewolves, as they are four-footed, move around prone on the ground, and do not have the power of laughter. Gerald of Wales, Opera 5, 2: 19, pp. 101–7. 153  Despite its status as a piece of logica vetus, the Isagoge was evidently still being read alongside new works of logic in the mid-twelfth century. One manuscript from St Mary’s Abbey in York, for example, featured the Isagoge alongside Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon. See the fragmentary list of contents in London, BL Add. 38816, f.18v. Elsewhere, a later MS, London, BL Arundel 383, features the Isagoge alongside the nova logica works of Aristotle. For an appraisal of Boethius’s work on logic, and his influence on the medieval curriculum, see John Marenbon, Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 17–42. 154  “Homo est carnes et ossa, est corpus et spiritus, est coloratus et intelligere potens, est homo et aptus ad ridendum. [ . . . ] Risibile est homo, risibile est proprium hominis.” Gilbert of Poitiers, Exposito in Boecii Librum Contra Euticien et Nestorium, in Gilbert of Poitiers, The Commentaries on Boethius, edited by Nikolaus  M.  Häring (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1966), vol. 1, p. 202, p. 296. 155  Taken from the Logica Modernum, edited by L. M. de Rijk (Assen, 1967). Quoted in G. R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 159.

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44  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century century.156 The logical works of the two most prominent philosophers from that period, Peter Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers, gave very little space to the issue. Abelard, for example, mentioned the risus capax only in a brief and perfunctory citation in his Theologia Scholarium, part way through a broader section on properties.157 He never returned to the point again in his philosophical writings, a lack of engagement which is surprising. Outside of his logical work, after all, Abelard had described how laughter should be feared, and that weeping, instead, was more proper to the human condition.158 As we saw earlier in the chapter, Abelard was accustomed to arguing that laughter belonged exclusively to the heavenly life to come.159 Perhaps it is a sign of the relative insignificance of laughter in this earlier period of philosophy that Abelard never thought to connect his theological opinions with the logical orthodoxy of properties. While he accepted the risus capax as an abstract premise, he did not allow it to alter his judgments about acceptable human behavior. The idea found a little more emphasis in the work of the celebrated logician Gilbert of Poitiers (d.1154). Compared with Abelard, Gilbert cited the risus capax far more often, spelling out its immediate logical implications with more thought and development. In a passage from one of his Boethian commentaries, Gilbert in fact placed the risus capax directly alongside the ability to reason as one of the fundamental faculties of the human being. Man is flesh and bone, body and spirit. He is colored, able to reason, and adapted to laughing.160

Gilbert similarly turned to the innate capacity to laugh as a way of illustrating the logic of human nature and substance. As an explanatory aside in a discussion of Christ’s incarnation, for instance, he stressed that if laughter was not observed then a being could no longer be defined as human.161 But while Gilbert accepted laughter as a natural faculty in the philosophical context, and even underlined its significance as a property equal to human reason, the weight of this logic was not enough to challenge entrenched theological associations between laughter and sin. In the very same commentary that he named laughter a defining human faculty, Gilbert also warned against “lascivious joking 156  This point is contrary to the implication in Resnick, “Risus Monasticus.” 157 Abelard, Theologia Christiana, III, PL vol. 178, col. 1235A. 158 Abelard, Sermo VI (In Septuagesima), PL vol. 178, col. 430A. 159 Abelard, Sermo IV (In Epiphania Domini), PL vol. 178, col. 487A. 160  Gilbert of Poitiers, Exposito in Boecii Librum De Bonorum Ebdomade, in The Commentaries on Boethius, edited by Nikolaus M. Häring, I: 66, p. 202. “Homo est carnes et ossa, est corpus et spiritus, est coloratus et intelligere potens, est homo et aptus ad ridendum.” Gilbert also referenced the idea in a similar way in another commentary on Boethius. See Gilbert of Poitiers, Exposito in Boecii Librum Contra Euticen et Nestorium, in The Commentaries on Boethius, edited by Nikolaus M. Häring I: 58; 2: 4; IV: 46. 161  Gilbert of Poitiers, Commentaria in Librum de Duabus Naturis et una Persona Christi, PL vol. 64, Natura, col. 1364b. See also col. 1369A and col. 1382B-C.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  45 and petulant laughter” (ioco lascivie risuque petulantie), which he contrasted (paradoxically, given his logic elsewhere) with the rationality of the mind.162 Although he accepted laughter’s basic dignity as a concept, it seems Gilbert could not fully shrug off the idea that laughter automatically equated sin.163 Only in the later twelfth century did the risus capax begin to filter through to wider theological debates. Specifically, it surfaced in discussions of Christ’s incarnation, which became an urgent topic of debate in the 1150s and 60s. Questioning the idea of “hypostatic union,” some scholars debated whether Christ was in fact not substantially human at all. If he was part human and part divine, they argued, then surely this kept him from being fully human. These kinds of views were denounced at the Council of Tours in 1163, however, with Pope Alexander III ruling it heretical to make a theological argument “in which Christ is said to be nothing as man.”164 Following the pope’s emphatic lead, theologians then began addressing Christ’s more concrete human capacities. In particular, the Apologia de Verbo Incarnato, an anonymous treatise on Christ’s incarnation written some time in the 1160s, focused on the faculty of laughter while discussing Christ’s ­natural human capacities. So, did Christ not participate in education, or laughter? If he did do these things, how could he not have been that which is human? But if these particular appearances of humanity were not predicated of him, how can the property “human” be applied to him? Surely somebody could not say that Christ could weep but not laugh?165

Although the Apologia’s conclusion on the matter was equivocal, it is revealing that the author of the text even conceived of applying the logic of the risus capax to the theology of Christ’s incarnate humanity. This seems to have been an unprecedented move. Neither Peter Lombard, in his Sentences (c.1150), nor John of Cornwall, in his Eulogium on Christ’s incarnation (c.1163), had referred to the human capacity for laughter at all when they made their extensive arguments about the nature of Christ’s humanity.166 In fact, most writers up until this point 162  Gilbert of Poitiers, Exposito . . . Bonorum Ebdomade, in The Commentaries on Boethius, edited by Nikolaus  M.  Häring, I: 7, p. 188. “Quod utique provenit non ab animi ratione sed a ioco lascivie risuque petulantie sue.” 163  Here we may recall his gloss on the Psalms, which suggested laughter could be useful so long as it was not for “low purposes.” 164  Robert Somerville, Pope Alexander III and the Council of Tours (1163): A Study of Ecclesiastical Politics and Institutions in the Twelfth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 60–1. 165  Nikolaus M. Häring, “The So-called Apologia de verbo incarnato,” Franciscan Studies 16 (1956): pp. 110–43, p. 131. “Item, nonne perceptibilis erat disciplinae, vel risibilis? Si ista ei conveniunt, quomodo non erat id quod est homo? Sed si haec species homo non praedicatur de eo, quomodo eius proprium potest ei convenire? Numquid dicet aliquis quia potuit Christus flere sed non ridere?” 166  Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book Three: On the Incarnation of the Word, translated by Giulio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008); John of Cornwall, Eulogium ad Alexandrum Papam tertium, edited by Nicholas M. Häring in Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951), pp. 253–300.

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46  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century had followed Gregory the Great, who argued that Christ must never have laughed as the fact was never mentioned anywhere in the Gospels.167 Alan of Lille (d.1202), the versatile theologian and preacher, took this Christological use of the risus capax one step further. In his Regulae Theologicae (c.1170), Alan applied the foundational logic of earlier thinkers, particularly Gilbert of Poitiers, to a range of key theological questions.168 Unlike Gilbert or Peter Lombard, however, Alan’s views of the nature of Christ’s incarnation referred directly to the issue of the risus capax. Using logical principles, Alan argued that Christ must have exercised the property of risibilitas, or the ability to laugh and make others laugh, as this was a necessary feature of a fully incarnate human being. The ability to laugh belongs to Christ, not according to divine nature, but rather according to human nature. It is therefore either according to the body, according to the soul, or according to a combination of the two. To this we respond that it is according to none of these, but rather according to a fusion of the body and the soul united together. Christ did not assume some arrangement of body and soul, but rather the body and soul together.169

Alan felt that risibilitas was a virtue of the soul as much as the body. No longer an isolated principle of abstracted argument, the logic of the risus capax had come to form the basis of a new, philosophically grounded understanding of the boundaries of the sacred in human behavior. Peter the Chanter (d.1197), the pioneer of the “biblical-moral” school of teaching at Paris, added yet another layer to this debate. Peter came to this same question of Christ’s laughter in his Verbum Adbreviatum, a hugely popular manual of ethics written in 1192.170 Acknowledging, like Alan of Lille before him, the logical position of the risus capax, Peter suggested that laughter could be befitting of Christ specifically in the way it projected an interior purity. But, is it not possible that God laughed? Possessing an interior of delightful good, it seems he should have been able to show it outwardly through laughter,

167  Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, IX, xxvii, 42; PL vol. 75, 881D-882B. Among examples of writers in the twelfth century repeating this interpretation: Hildebert of Lavardin, Sermones, PL, vol. 171, col. 701B-C; Adam of Dryburgh, De tripartito tabernaculo, XII: 166, PL vol. 198, col. 771C-D. This issue is also discussed in Jacques Le Goff, “Jésus a-t-il ri?” L’Histoire 158 (1992), pp. 72–4. 168 G. R. Evans, Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 71–2. 169  Alan of Lille, Regulae Theologicae, PL vol. 210, number 101, cols.675C-676A. “Hoc tamen sic conantur asserere. Risibilitas inest Christo, et non secundum divinam naturam: ergo secundum humanum; ergo aut secundum corpus, aut secundum animam, aut secundum compositum ex utroque. Ad quod dicimus quod secundum nullum istorum, sed secundum corpus, et animam sibi unitam; non enim aliquod compositum ex corpore et anima assumpsit; sed tantum corpus et animam sibi unitam.” 170  The work survives in over one hundred manuscripts and was widely used in the last decade of the twelfth century and beyond. For more on Peter and his work, see John  W.  Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  47 especially as he took upon himself all our defects (except our moral faults). In fact, if laughing or risibility is a property of the human given by nature, how therefore could Christ not have used it? Perhaps he did, but we simply do not read about it.171

Christ had the capacity to laugh, according to Peter, although he may not have actually used it. Wrestling with this clash between logical and theological approaches, he conceded that the possession of an interior purity could reasonably be manifested in laughter. However, he did not feel that the risus capax could be used to sanction all types of laughter in the same way. As he stressed later on in the same passage, Christians should avoid “frivolous” and “deceptive” laughter at all costs.172 While reminding his readers of saintly abbots who never laughed and the forbidding message of Luke’s Gospel, however, Peter still felt that the risus capax gave laughter a degree of dignity. Laughing was perfectly ethical in a Christian, he wrote, so long as it emanated from a joyful mind. Let us therefore pursue a cheerful mind, and not engage in indecency. Let us delight according to the faces of the saints, turning their faces to Jerusalem.173

When approaching philosophical discourse, it therefore seems appropriate to draw a distinction between the two halves of the twelfth century. In the time of Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers, the risus capax was a firmly established logical principle, widely known through the works of Porphyry and, indirectly, Aristotle. In the confines of philosophical debate, the ability to laugh was acknowledged as a property of human beings on the same footing as the ability to reason and was even employed as a means of defining what it was to be human. But outside of these narrow debates on properties, this idea did not have much impact on intellectual approaches to laughter in this earlier period. Only in the second half of the century, with the probing work of Alan of Lille and Peter the Chanter, did the implications of the risus capax begin to open out onto questions of theology and divine incarnation. With risibilitas understood as a unique property of the human being, laughter was inherently naturalized as a mode of behavior. As this logic was digested, laughter was then given a higher stake in theological conceptions of 171  Peter the Chanter, Verbum Adbreviatum, edited by Monique Boutry (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), Textus Prior, ch. 60, p. 379. “Sed nonne potuit bene Deus risisse? Videtur quidem quod habita causa interiore, scilicet leticia bona, quod eam exterius in opere ridendi monstrare possit, maxime cum omnes defectus nostros preterquam culpe assumpserit; etiam cum risibile vel risibilitas proprium sit hominis a natura datum, quomodo ergo eo uti non potuit? Forte potuit, sed non legitur eo usus fuisse.” 172  “Risus autem moderatus si continuus fuerit, suspectus tibi habeatur; pocius enim huiusmodi risus prodicionis est quam exultacionis. De sic ridente dicitur: Maledictus homo absconditus in civitate, paratus semper blando fraudem contexere risu.” Peter the Chanter, Verbum Adbreviatum, Textus Prior, ch. 60, pp. 379–80. Note that in the margin of Cambridge, St John’s College Library MS 30, a hand has added: “Post risus autem risus simulationis est indicium,” suggesting further thoughts about the connection between laughter and dissimulation. (Manuscript detail observed by Boutry, p. 790.) 173  Peter the Chanter, Verbum Adbreviatum, Textus Prior, ch. 60, p. 379. “Sectemur ergo mentis hilaritatem sic ut non committetur lascivia; iocundemur secundum faciem sanctorum habentes faciem euntium in Ierusalem.”

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48  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century human behavior by extension. This prevalence, along with the sense, expounded in the influential work of Peter the Chanter, of an entirely spiritual facet to the property of risibility, meant that by the end of the century there was a new space for a philosophically underpinned, divine concept of laughter.

Rhetoric As scholars at Paris, Henry’s literate courtiers would have also been intimately familiar with the rhetorical curriculum. For students of rhetoric at this time, as much as for compilers of preaching manuals, the use and acceptance of laughter was a vivid issue. Bodily discipline and codes of manners were especially emphasized in the civil education in rhetoric at Paris in the mid-twelfth century.174 Classical works of rhetoric, particularly those of Cicero and Quintillian, were beginning to be read, glossed, and taught in the schools, introducing an exciting range of paradigms for using laughter and humor in the course of debating and preaching.175 These more practical views brought a dynamic new sense of laughter’s value, both as a coercive tool and as an adornment of refined eloquence. Of his rhetorical works, Cicero’s De Oratore (c.55 bc) had the most to say on the matter of laughter.176 Far more popular in this period, however, was his De Inventione, which, according to one estimate, was the most produced and copied text of the entire twelfth century.177 Cicero in this text offered a compelling case for incorporating laughter into successful speeches. It was especially useful, he argued, for speakers who needed to reinvigorate their audiences and capture listeners’ attention. He advised people to use their discretion, however, ensuring the laughter they provoked was always in harmony with the dignity of the subject being ­discussed. If the matter at hand seemed inconsistent with joking, then Cicero advised the speaker to incite other types of emotional engagement instead, particularly through shock, fear, or else weeping.178 We can find similar principles in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a manual that circulated widely in the twelfth century under Cicero’s name.179 Broadly speaking, this text went into greater detail on the issue of laughter, proposing that it was 174 Jaeger, Envy of Angels, p. 32. 175  On the impact of these texts in the twelfth century, see Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, pp. 89–132. 176  James Jerome Murphy, drawing on the work of Max Manitius, states that only three MSS of the De Oratore were produced in the twelfth century. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, p. 111. Neither does the De Oratore feature in Olsen’s list of widely-circulated twelfth-century MSS. Olsen, “The Production of the Classics,” p. 17. 177 Olsen counts 126 surviving MSS from the twelfth century. Olsen, “The Production of the Classics,” p. 17. 178 Cicero, De Inventione, I, 17: “Sin res dabit, non inutile est ab aliqua re nova aut ridicula ­incipere . . . aut si rei dignitas adimet iocandi facultatem, aliquid triste, novum, horribile . . .” 179 The Ad Herennium survives in 116 MSS from the twelfth century. Olsen, “The Production of the Classics,” p. 17.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  49 essential so long as it was incited in a “gentlemanly spirit.” Discoursing on flexibility in conversation, the text promoted a jocose mode of speech (iocationem), alongside dignified, explicative, and narrative styles of presentation. “In certain specific circumstances,” the manual explained, “a jocose tone can elicit modest and generous laughter (risum pudentem et liberalem).”180 Again, the emphasis was on the mode or manner of causing laughter in speech. Although the voice should carry a suggestion of levity reaching to laughter (risus), by no means should it give even the slightest suspicion of vulgar laughter (cachinnum).181 This, the text said, was the ideal tone of “generous joking” (liberalem iocum). Alongside Cicero, Quintillian (d.c.100 ad) was the other classical rhetorician whose work carried most influence in the circles of Henry II’s courtiers.182 His Instituta Oratoria was one of the few classical texts that Thomas Becket cited directly in his letters, rather than quoting from a florilegium.183 Elsewhere, Stephen of Rouen abridged the work in his compendium,184 and John of Salisbury sent a request to the monk Azo for a copy of the same book while he was in exile at Pontigny in 1168.185 Refining and occasionally contradicting Cicero’s views on laughter, Quintillian above all stressed the importance of wise discernment in rhetorical humor. He argued that Cicero had “affected too much pleasantry” in his audience by joking too often.186 If one lacked discipline, Qunitillian warned, laughter could take possession of a person’s body. “It bursts forth in people even against their will,” he said, a power which allowed it to dissipate both hatred and anger.187 For laughter to be useful for the orator, Quintillian insisted that it instead needed to be controlled through order or method.188 He described this refined laughter as reflecting the secret taste of the cognoscenti.189 This was the wit of

180 Cicero, Ad Herennium, III, 13: 23: “Locatio est oratio quae ex aliqua re risum pudentem et ­liberalem potest conparare.” 181 Cicero, Ad Herennium, III, 14: 25: “Sin erit sermo in iocatione, leviter tremebunda voce, cum parva significatione risus, sine ulla suspicione nimiae cachinnationis.” 182  On the use of Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria in twelfth-century schools, see John  O.  Ward, “Quintillian and the Rhetorical Revolution of the Middle Ages,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 13: 3 (1995): pp. 231–84. For example, the late twelfth-century Ad Herennium catena gloss in Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 250 shows extensive knowledge of the Institutio Oratoria (Ward, “Quintillian,” p. 249). 183  This fact is evident from looking at Becket’s citations in Anne Duggan’s edition of his corres­ pondences. Becket Correspondence, vol. 2, pp. 1430–8. 184  Ward, “Quintillian,” pp. 253–4. 185  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, Letter 263, p. 534. 186 Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, VI, 3: 2, accessed September 2012, http://penelope.uchicago. edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/home.html. 187 Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, VI, 3: 9. “Erumpit etiam invitis saepe, nec vultus modo ac vocis exprimit confessionem, sed totum corpus vi sua concutit. Rerum autem saepe, ut dixi, maximarum momenta vertit, ut cum odium iramque frequentissime frangat.” Note that here, VI, 3: 10, Quintillian retells the anecdote about King Pyrrhus from Valerius Maximus, which was repeated by Gerald of Wales as an anecdote about Henry II. (Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, p. 63.) 188 Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, VI, 3: 14–16. “Accedit difficultati quod eius rei nulla exercitatio est, nulli praeceptores. . . . si paulum adhibita ratione fingerentur aut aliquid in his senum quoque esset admixtum, plurimum poterant utilitatis adferre.” 189 Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, VI, 3: 19. “. . . quod sentitur latente iudicio velut palato.”

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50  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century urbanitas, he said, a wit engendered by sophisticated conversation with the wise.190 So long as laughter was of this higher discretion, Quintillian suggested, it should be one of the noblest elements in the rhetorical arsenal. Cicero and Quintillian were a new departure. Older works of medieval rhetoric, still extant in the twelfth century, had usually described laughter as a base or arrogant distraction from the serious vocation of preaching. The Flores Rhetorici by Alberic of Monte Cassino (d.1088) conflated joking with frivolous speech, which Alberic said detracted from the power of brevity.191 The Rhetorimachia, an influential synthesis of rhetorical theory produced by Anselm of Besate in the 1040s, also warned the orator against “jocose words,” which he said added the flavor of arrogance to any speech.192 This attitude to laughter chimed with the early twelfth century’s harsh regulations against the public behavior of sermonizers, and direct­ ives against priests who got drunk, laughed, and made base jokes in the course of their services.193 As Ivo of Chartres recorded in his Decretum (c.1090), a vast collection of guidelines for clerical behavior, “If a cleric or a monk speaks like a buffoon, or jokes to move an audience to laughter, he should be vigorously rebuked.”194 By the later twelfth century however the influence of Cicero in particular was coming to be felt in the schools. At this point guides for rhetorical practice had begun to take a more permissive and practical perspective on laughter. Thierry of Chartres (d.c.1150), one of John of Salisbury’s teachers, produced commentaries on the De Inventione and the Ad Herennium that were among the more popular rhetorical textbooks at Paris from the 1140s onwards.195 As Thierry explained, he had no problem with orators provoking laughter so long as it was not of a vulgar or raucous kind (i.e., so long as it was not a cachinnum).196 Humor could even provide a valuable respite, he said, “relieving the listeners with a joke or with some novelty.”197 He maintained, however, that these tactics should only be reserved for situations where worn-out listeners needed ingratiating. 190 Quintillian, Institutio Oratoria, VI, 3: 17. 191  Alberici Casinensis, Flores Rhetorici, edited by D. H. Inguanez and H. M. Willard (Montecassino: Miscellanea Cassinese, 1938), pp. 31–59: section 7. 192 Anselm of Besate, Rhetorimachia. In Gunzo Epistola ad Augienses und Anselm von Besate Rhetorimachia. Quellen zur Geistegeschichte des Mittelalters 2, edited by Karl Manitius, 59–183 (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus (MGH), 1958), pp. 59–183, p. 105. 193  Ivo of Chartres, Collectio Tripartita, edited by M. Brett, accessed January 30 2017, https://ivo-ofchartres.github.io/tripartita/trip_b_a.pdf], B.10, “De Clericis et eorum causis”: Section 6: Ex concilio Nannetensi, cp. x. De presbiteris parroechialibus cum conuenerint ut se inebriare non audeant, p.93. See also Gratian, Decretum, C: VII: Palea. 194  Ivo of Chartres, Decretum, VI, 262: “Si quis clericus aut monachus scurrilia, iocularia, risumque moventia loquitur, acerrime corripiatur,” accessed January 30 2012, [https://ivo-of-chartres.github.io/ decretum/ivodec_6.pdf, accessed April 17th 2019], VI, 262, p.84: “Si quis clericus aut monachus scurrilia, iocularia, risumque moventia loquitur, acerrime corripiatur.”] 195 See the introduction in. Thierry of Chartres, The Latin Rhetorical Commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, edited by Karin M. Fredborg (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1988), pp. 1–44. 196  Commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, III, 13: 23, p. 297. 197  Commentaries of Thierry of Chartres, I, 17: 25, p. 116. “Haec autem insinuatio attentionis est . . . aut promittendo brevitatem maiorem quam proposueramus, aut auditores recreando per aliquem iocum aut per rem novam, id est per novum rumorem, si causa permittat.”

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  51 Not every preacher was sold on the value of laughter. According to Alan of Lille’s Artes Praedicatoria, the aim of preaching was solemn, and should exclude any buffoonery or farcical theatrical spectacle.198 Yet ultimately it was Thierry’s thoughtful Ciceronian pragmatism that had more purchase on the theory of rhetoric at Henry II’s court. At a theoretical level, John of Salisbury insisted in his Policraticus that the speaker should adapt comic words “to the requirement of his theme and occasion.”199 More practically, Gerald of Wales’s exempla collection, the Gemma ecclesiae, pioneered humor as a means of preaching moral reform.200 Most of all, we will see in the third chapter how Quintillian’s praise of urbanitas resounded through the corridors of twelfth-century power. Although the rhetor­ ician was not given a total carte blanche for witticisms, by the time of Henry II rhetorical wit and comic technique were beginning to find harmony with the stricter moral vocation of Christian preaching.

Medical Literature We might expect that encounters with the medical profession gave royal courtiers an entirely different angle on laughter. Indeed, many twelfth-century medical texts treated excessive laughter as a symptom of bodily imbalances, while others suggested it was a type of sickness in its own right. Embedded within these medical judgments about laughter’s role in the body, however, were many of the same cultural assumptions that we have seen throughout this chapter. Regardless of how they situated it in the body, many of these medical views ultimately depended on wider beliefs that laughter was either inherently harmful to the human being, or else manifested some inherent sin or vice from within. The story of twelfth-century medical laughter, much like the other discourses and debates we have seen so far, is a story of this negative view becoming gradually countered by a series of new, positive assumptions about laughter’s power. Since at least the De Universo of Rabanus Maurus (d.856), medieval medics believed that the bodily origin of laughter was the spleen.201 While this connection was widely known at Henry’s court, writers differed over the organ’s precise role. Above all there was confusion over whether the spleen was laughter’s cause, 198 Alan of Lille, Summa magistri Alani doctoris universalis de arte praedicatoria, PL vol. 210, cols.113D-114C; and col. 112B-C.  This is also cited in. Jeannine Horowitz and Sophia Menache, L’Humour en chaire: Le rire dans l’Eglise médiévale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1994), p. 59. “Praedicatio enim in se, non debet habere verba scurrilia, vel puerilia, vel rhythmorum melodias et consonantias metrorum, quae potius fiunt ad aures demulcendas, quam ad animum instruendum, quae praedicatio theatralis est et mimica, et ideo omnifarie contemnenda.” 199  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 2, p. 140. 200  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, 2: 19. See also Gerald’s Speculum ecclesiae. 201  Rabanus Maurus, De Universo, 6: 1, PL vol. 111, col. 172C-D.  On this connection see Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Medicine, vol. 1, Primitive and Ancient Medicine (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), p. 212.

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52  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century its repository, or instead something that was more generally “nourished” by laughter. According to the court poet Serlo of Wilton (d.1181), the spleen “drew laughter” from elsewhere in the body,202 while for the chronicler Roger of Howden (d.1201) it was only the “storehouse of laughter and mirth.”203 On the other hand, the Cistercian Isaac of Stella described how vulgar laughter “feeds the spleen, even while we are dying or decaying.”204 Like fluids such as bile or blood, laughter was imagined as traveling through the body with a power all its own, overflowing in either ill health or rushes of wellness. Often twelfth-century medics wrote about how excessive laughter could harm the body. In extreme cases, a number of medical texts even suggested that laughing could kill a person. Rabanus Maurus had once described a type of poison that made people die laughing when it was ingested.205 Much later, the English physician Gilbertus Anglicus (d.c.1250) warned about the ticklish venes titillares. While these veins were ordinarily stimulated in joking, Gilbert warned that if they were cut off, they could lead to death by laughter.206 Mania was another acute concern for medics. The Italian medic Maurus of Salerno (d.1214) described in his Optimus Physicus how people suffering from mania had a tendency to obsessively provoke laughter in onlookers.207 Too much blood in the body, another twelfth-century text from Salerno claimed, could result in manic frenzies of ­terrifying laughter.208 Occasionally it can be difficult to draw the line between medical opinion on laughter and theological anxieties. An interesting case is Hildegard of Bingen (d.1179), the visionary theologian and sometime medical practitioner.209 In her Cause et cure, Hildegard explained that excessive laughter was caused by having “a thick spleen,” a defect she said infected a person with fluctuating emotions.210 Warning that it would “dry the lungs and shake the liver,” Hildegard claimed that excessive laughter broke the equilibrium of good humors in the body.211

202  Oxford, Digby MS 53, f.47r. 203 Roger of Howden, Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houdene, edited by William Stubbs, vol. 1 (London: Rolls Series, 1868), p. 515. 204 Isaac, Sermons, vol. I, Sermon 2, p. 110. 205  Rabanus Maurus, De Universo, col. 358A. 206  “Si vene titillares in coxis abscidantur homo moritur ridendo.” Cited in Henry E. Handerson, Gilbertus Anglicus: Medicine of the Thirteenth Century (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Medical Library Association, 1918), p. 107. 207  M. H. Saffron, “Maurus of Salerno: Twelfth-Century ‘Optimus physicus’, with his Commentary on the Prognostics of Hippocrates,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 62: 1 (1972): pp. 1–104, p. 26. 208  De quattuor humoribus, in. Collectio Salernitana, edited by Salvatore De Renzi. 5 vols. (Napoli, Filiatre-Sebezio, 1852–9)., vol. 2, pp. 411–12. Translation by Corner in George W. Corner, “The Rise of Medicine at Salerno in the Twelfth Century,” Annals of Medical History 3: 1 (1931): pp. 1–16. 209  Hildegard’s laughter is discussed in Olga V. Trokhimenko, “Keeping Up Appearances: Women’s Laughter and the Performance of Virtue in Medieval German Discourse,” PhD Dissertation (Duke University 2006), pp. 136ff. 210  Hildegard of Bingen, Cause et cure, edited by Laurence Mouliner and Rainer Berndt (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 314, p. 189. 211  Hildegard of Bingen, Cause et cure, 415, p. 245.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  53 Addressing the same problems in her theological writing, however, Hildegard changed her approach to both cure and cause. Here she argued that laughter was instead caused by a lack of moral discipline. Her Liber vite meritorum includes a vivid dialogue to illustrate the issue, in which a lazy dog defends laughter as a “beautiful vent for the soul.” Hildegard rebuts the dog by arguing that those who gave themselves too often to laughter were “like the wind,” and should be subjected to “justice and discipline.”212 Where she had suggested a material cure in the medical context, Hildegard’s theological advice focused instead on changing behavior and attitudes. For Hildegard, cultural anxieties seem to have been in a two-way street with medical approaches. Was laughter ever a sign of good health in twelfth-century medicine? By the end of the 1100s, connections between laughter and vitality sharpened as medical writers began to appreciate the role of the four temperaments in the body. By this period, practitioners were beginning to rank the sanguine temperament (hot and moist) as superior to choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic dispositions. As one copyist explained in the margins of an Oxford medical manuscript, while sanguine people “desire much and are capable of much,” those with melancholic humor (who typically prefer tears to laughter) “desire little and are capable of little.”213 We can find this preference in the Regimen Sanitatis, a poetic medical text composed at Salerno in the mid twelfth century. Frequent laughter is associated in the text with a sanguine temperament. Not only does it coincide with good cheer and a robust social life, this sanguine laughter is described as restoring vitality to the heart.214 Critically, the spleen was now understood as a means for cleansing the body from melancholic sadness. As demonstrated in a set of Quaestiones used by medical students at Salerno around the year 1200, the spleen’s laughter was even credited with restoring happiness: Why do we laugh with the spleen? Because the spleen cleans the blood of the melancholic superfluity that induces sadness. The result is therefore the contrary, namely happiness.215

Another firm affirmation of laughter’s healthiness came in the Secretum Secretorum, an Arabic medical text that spread to the medical schools of Salerno 212  Hildegard of Bingen, Liber vite meritorum, edited by A. Carlevaris (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), I, ch. 2. 213  The Prose Salernitan Questions: An Anonymous Collection Dealing with Science and Medicine Written by an Englishman c.1200, with an Appendix of Ten Related Collections. Edited by Brian Lawn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Book 8, p. 6. 214  Regimen sanitates, in The School of Salernum: Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, edited and translated by John Harrington, Francis R. Packard, and Fielding H. Garrison (New York: A. M. Kelly, 1970), p. 174. Discussing Sanguine humor: “Hos venus et bacchus delectant, fercula, risus, et facit hos hilares, et dulcia verba loquentes. Omnibus hi studies habiles sunt, et magis apti. Qualibet ex causa nec hoc leviter movens ira. Largus, amans, hilaris, ridens, rubeique coloris, Cantans, carnosus, satis audax, atque benignus.” 215 Brian Lawn, The Salernitan Questions: An Introduction to the History of Medieval and Renaissance Problem Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), Question 285, p. 138.

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54  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century and Montpellier after c.1150. Circulating in a partial translation, known to Walter of Châtillon among others at Henry’s court, the Secretum reflected on the habits of those who maintained a healthy balance of heat and strength in the body.216 Unlike the unhealthy, whose overwork meant they dried up in the heat of the sun, these healthy bodies manifested their composure in reasoned discourse and a smart appearance. Perhaps the most dynamic outward sign of their wellness was their delightful laughter. And good is the one who turns to honorable joy, and who playfully delights in good reason, in honorable hope, and in victory over enemies . . . He hears the sweetest songs and laughs with delight, putting on his best clothes and applying sweet ointments with modest control.217

Here the impact of an Arabic cultural tradition is crucial. Whereas Latin medicine had typically repeated theological and cultural anxieties about laughter, these non-Latin sources shared no such assumptions, presenting laughter as a natural sign of health and wellbeing. During the later 1100s, as Arabic works like the Secretum Secretorum entered the European medical mainstream alongside Greek theories of temperament, laughter gained a new status in the body. Within a few decades, medical practitioners such as Alexander Neckam (d.1217) and Gilbertus Anglicus (d.1240) were able to argue that frequent laughter meant a “kindness and geniality in all things,” and that those who rarely laughed should even be regarded with suspicion.218 * * * So, what did Henry II’s courtiers think about when they encountered laughter? Evidently it was an attractive and controversial issue. Across theological, monastic, satirical, rhetorical, philosophical, and medical discourses in the twelfth century, laughter took on a deep range of moral associations. While it could signal slack morals and damnation, it could also conjure images of divine presence and the joys of paradise. Beliefs that the very act of laughing could accrue punishment in Hell evidently played on the imaginations of monks, preachers, and doctors alike. 216  See Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 31–59. The Secretum Secretorum was known to the twelfth century in a partial translation, the Epistola de conservatione sanitatis. One of the earliest copies of this text known in England can be found in a manuscript given to the Benedictine priory of St. Cuthbert in Durham by a doctor named “Master Herbert.” See Williams, p. 373. For Walter of Châtillon’s knowledge of the text, see The Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon, translated by David Townsend (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), p. 17. 217  BL Harley MS 978, fol. 23r. “Et bonum est si contingat honore gaudium, racionabilem gloriam, et honorem spem et victoriam de inimicis et ludis delectari, facies pulchras aspicere libros delectabiles legere. Cantus quoque suavissimos audire et cum dilectis ridere, vestimentis optimis indui et ungentis ungi temperibus tum congruis.” 218 Handerson, Gilbertus Anglicus, p. 35; Alexander Neckam, Suppletio Defectum, in Suppletio defectuum: Alexander Neckam on Plants, Birds, and Animals, edited by Christopher  J.  McDonough (Florence: Galluzzo, 1999), pp. 32–3.

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The Making of Powerful Laughter, c.1100–1200  55 Yet, by the second half of the 1100s, the idea that laughter could also be sign of spiritual enlightenment was becoming a recurring motif in all kinds of intellectual discourse. At either end of this spectrum, it is important to stress, laughter remained associated with death, salvation, and final redemption. Without doubt, these connections laid the grounds for laughter to articulate a transcendent power of its own. All of this opens up a new chronology of laughter in medieval history. According to Jacques Le Goff, laughter became more acceptable in ecclesiastical discourses in the 1200s, a shift he attributed in part to the practical influence of the mendicant friars, as well as the impact of Aristotle on philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas.219 From what we have found, it seems that bodily laughter acquired a strong moral dimension in Christian discourse a little earlier. By the second half of the twelfth century, theologians began suggesting that laughter could manifest divine presence, monastic writers started to argue that mystical laughter could be expressed through the body, and among the most enlightened monks, ecstatic laughter was said to channel the highest heights of God’s grace. Ideas about moral laughter had existed in earlier Christian discourse, yet often as explicitly non-corporeal, exemplified in the metaphorical “laughter of the heart.” By the period of Henry II’s reign, this moral laughter was increasingly associated with the body itself. Importantly, these emerging associations cut across the whole range of sacred and secular debates, with Christian conceptions of moral laughter often appearing in dialogue with ideas in other intellectual arenas. As we can see from the glosses made on Peter the Chanter’s Verbum Adbreviatum in the 1190s, the thought of classical satirists was instrumental in informing the theology of a laughing Christ. More practically, rhetorical ideas about laughter’s utility reached preaching manuals in the later 1100s, while philosophical discussion of laughter as a natural human property came to be applied to theological debates in the same period. It is tempting to look for a grand explanation for this shift. Is there a common factor behind laughter’s apparent transformation into a more positive force throughout the later 1100s? It is true, as Le Goff and others have argued, that classical texts brought new satirical and rhetorical ideas to Christian audiences, and that these cast ideas of laughter in a new light. But we cannot underestimate the changing internal Christian dynamics of laughter, either. As the debates about Jesus’s laughter demonstrate, writers only began introducing classical ideas such as the risus capax into Christian discourse when they felt they had gained a theological legitimacy. Perhaps the key pivot in twelfth-century views was, after all, Bernard of Clairvaux. Dignifying gestures such as laughter by claiming they reflected holy interiority, Bernard’s Cistercians participated in reappraising the

219  Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages.” A number of other prominent historians and critics have also pointed to an equivalent movement in the period around 1200. See for example Jean Verdon, Rire au Moyen Age (Paris: Perrin, 2001); Horowitz and Menache, L’Humour en chaire; Sauerländer, “Vom Gelächter.”

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56  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century role of the body in twelfth-century devotion. While inner joy had once been seen as mutually exclusive to outer joy, laughter now found a new role as a sign of internal grace. When Henry II’s courtiers were writing in the final decades of the 1100s, therefore, laughter had become a lively and controversial topic. Conversations on the subject were divisive, with sharp concerns about moral and immoral laughter, and the place of humor in devotion, contemplation, and social critique. Above all, there are grounds to suggest that laughter had acquired an intense moral and eschatological power by the reign of Henry II. As either a sign of damnable immorality or interior grace, it often triggered associations with salvation and divine justice in theological and philosophical texts. As we will see, these were connections that played a crucial role in opening up a space for narrative images of both the laughing king and the laughing saint.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative Caesar gives way to two kinds of will, according to fortune: With success, he has the opportunity for laughter. Caesar rises up in adversity, and does not drown in honor: An angry face, however, he gives in the winter of success.1 Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria (c.1150–75) When the courtier Gerald of Wales remembered Henry II joking with a pair of drunks, he could not help thinking of a story about a king from ancient Greece. According to Gerald, two men had been found drinking in King Henry’s cellar, slandering his name while enjoying his best wines. Dragged before the king and asked to explain their insults, one of them answered: “That was really nothing to what we would have said if the wine had not run out.”2 Hearing this joke, Henry apparently laughed and showed the two men mercy. At first glance, this anecdote may appear to be a straightforward eyewitness recollection. We know, after all, that Gerald spent a good deal of time in the king’s company, and that he often recorded colorful incidents like this. But if we look in Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta, an ancient chronicle that we can guess Gerald enjoyed, we find the very same act of laughing mercy, recorded almost word for word, in a story about King Phyrrus.3 Gerald was not alone, of course, in seeing contemporary figures through a textual filter. Whenever twelfth-century writers described political action, they frequently drew on a vast literary canon of legendary kings, saints, lovers, and prophets. Typically, rulers were cast in the image of either Charlemagne or Caesar, while the lives of saints were mapped onto tales of Christ or Saint Martin. In one sense the use of these archetypes maintained a curious distance between

1  Cesaris ad nutus nutat fortuna biforme [biformis]:/Casus ceu risum prosperitatis habet./Cesar in adversis surgit, nec mergit honore:/Vultus irate prosperitatis hiems. Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria: The Art of Versification, edited and translated by Aubrey E. Galyon (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980), I:51, p. 101. 2  Gerald of Wales, Vita S. Remigii, 28, Opera 7, p. 63. 3  Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia, book 5, chs. 1, 3. Note that Henry’s son, King John, also owned a copy of Valerius Maximus’ text. See Stephen Church, King John: The Road to Magna Carta (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 153–5.

Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century. Peter Jones, Oxford University Press (2019). © Peter J. A. Jones. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001

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58  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century perceptions and descriptions of the world.4 Some historians have even wondered whether it was possible for medieval readers and writers to actually see the personalities of kings or saints, at all, outside of exemplary confines.5 Yet these models and typologies obviously also worked in dialogue with genuine experience. Gerald of Wales was only able to get away with passing off a classical anecdote of royal laughter as an account of Henry II, after all, as the scene fitted comfortably with his audience’s memories and expectations of the king. Although today laughter may appear as a social sign with many meanings, in twelfth-century narrative it assumed a relatively narrow set of roles. One old assumption, refuted emphatically by the French medievalist Philippe Ménard, was that laughter in medieval texts was primarily either crude or brutal. In his Le rire et le sourire, Ménard tried to classify all descriptions of laughing and smiling in courtly romances from the period c.1150–1250. In particular, Ménard worked to expose laughter’s sophisticated and enriching role, identifying it variously as a sign of sharp self-criticism, of courageousness, and of refined dissimulation.6 Building on Ménard’s work, while thinking more explicitly about laughter as a mode of politics, this chapter will explore three twelfth-century motifs: ecstatic laughter (which I will call risus mysticus), diabolical laughter (risus blasphemus), and heroic laughter (risus regalis). Each of these motifs appears consistently throughout the narrative works of the period, and each exposes something unique in how contemporaries connected laughter and power. Typically, the risus mysticus appears in texts when individuals laugh in a state of wisdom or ecstasy, such as when they experience a divine vision or a mystical presence. We can identify the risus blasphemus, by contrast, when figures are shown laughing maliciously at saints, prophecies, or sacred objects. Usually those who laugh in this way are soon afterwards shown being miraculously punished with death, defeat, or disfigurement. Conversely, the risus regalis, a motif that we could perhaps apply to Gerald’s anecdote about Henry and the drunks, typically involves a powerful figure (often a king) demonstrating their superior skills in leadership through their use of diplomatic laughter, discreet wit, or wise jokes. Most significantly, these motifs were often mobilized at pivotal moments in the recorded lives of medieval kings. Edward the Confessor (d.1066), the saintly king of England, was described in a series of twelfth-century hagiographies laughing while he received miraculous visions and prophecies. King William Rufus (d.1100), whose reputation was much more checkered, was shown suddenly

4 Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 327. 5  See Jacques Le Goff ’s comments on perceiving the “real” Saint Louis through the model of kingship in contemporary writing. Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, translated by Gareth Evan Gollard (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp. 399–418. 6  Philippe Ménard, Le rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen Âge (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1969), especially pp. 26–8.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  59 dying after he laughed at a prophecy of his own death. But as later political ­circumstances changed, so did representations of this King William’s laughter. Later he was recast by different writers as laughing with wisdom and making jokes while exercising his regal skill and good judgment. As these different laughing kings were well known to the writers at Henry II’s court, it will be worth exploring each of these case studies in more depth. Yet we must also appreciate how these motifs and figurations permeated the entire literary culture of the 1100s.7 Examples of the risus mysticus reverberated throughout twelfth-century hagiographies and can be identified in the metaphor of laughing damsels in romantic epics, and even in the erotic laughter of lovers in troubadour songs. Cruel punishments for laughing the risus blasphemus can be found through a range of exempla tales and histories, while the heroic laughter of the risus regalis can be traced across a series of chronicles and epic poems in the latter part of the 1100s. This chapter is concerned with how laughter was perceived as a discrete sign in medieval texts. Specifically, therefore, the analysis is limited only to those textual passages in which medieval authors explicitly identified laughter, or else clearly indicated that something was meant to be laughed at. My analysis focuses on images of laughing kings, partly to contribute to this book’s broader interest in the image of the laughing Henry II, but also because they were emerging as prominent figures in twelfth-century narrative. Jacques Le Goff once argued that the character of the laughing or witty king, what he called the rex facetus, had become a common feature of court literature by the turn of the thirteenth century. The unique capacity of this motif, Le Goff argued, was that it showed a playful side of kingship, a quality he identified in exempla tales of Philip Augustus (d.1223), in the Chansons de Geste (c.1200) images of Louis the Pious, and in court romances celebrating King Arthur.8 For Le Goff, these images of kings laughing and amusing their entourage reflected a new pattern in European courtly manners, one typified by Louis IX’s attempts to appease and “domesticate” his court.9 They signified, above all, a shift toward a more indirect way of operating government. Not everyone agrees with Le Goff ’s equation between laughter and courtly pragmatism. More recently, Gerd Dicke has cast doubt on whether the rex facetus actually reflected a distinct philosophy of laughter in medieval texts at all. Instead, Dicke suggests that laughing kings can be found everywhere because the alternative, showing kings being resistant to laughter, might have perversely implied that

7  I use the term “figuration” here quite specifically. As Peter Dronke has commented, with figurae there is an understanding that the object and referent are of an equal importance, tied in an inseparable relationship with one another. See the comment in Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 5. 8  Jacques Le Goff, “Philippe Auguste dans les Exempla,” in La France de Philippe Auguste, edited by R. H. Bautier (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1982), pp. 145–55. 9  Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, pp. 388–90.

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60  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century they instead preferred violence.10 Against Le Goff ’s characterization of the ­laughing king as a benign and flexible ruler, meanwhile, Dicke illustrates how laughter also became a sign that a ruler was beset by evil spirits.11 While humor may have been in the process of becoming an established aspect of medieval courtly hilaritas and laetitia around the year 1200, as Dicke shows, laughter still retained strong associations with a darker side of leadership. Building on Le Goff ’s conception of a benignly pragmatic rex facetus, but also working very much with Gerd Dicke’s caveats in mind, I will suggest that medieval writers saw something altogether more fearsome and powerful in laughing kings. A wide range of twelfth-century texts tapped into a growing literary tradition, one that connected royal laughter to divine providence and a quasi-theological power. By associating laughter with prophecies, deadly bolts of lightning, and the ripping out of blasphemous tongues, these writers invested it with a power that made kings appear dynamic and morally divisive. Even more intriguingly, they imagined it appearing precisely at moments of rupture in the ordinary modes of custom and law.

Risus Mysticus: The Laughing Prophecies of Edward the Confessor (d.1066) Edward the Confessor, who ruled England from 1041 until his death in 1066, was celebrated by later generations as a royal saint. But over the course of the twelfth century, he also came to be remembered as an archetypal laughing king. Although he was canonized during the reign of Henry II, Edward’s achievements were first recounted in a series of lives written in the last years of the eleventh century. The first and most influential of these early works was the anonymous Vita Aedwardi (c.1065–6), a perplexing and fragmentary text that survives in a manuscript from around 1100.12 Not strictly a hagiography, but not really a straightforward secular biography either, this fusion of poetry and prose was dedicated to Edward’s wife Queen Edith (d.1075) and her family.13 Here, alongside a number of other accounts of Edward’s virtuous deeds, we find an extraordinary episode of the saintly king laughing while receiving a prophetic vision. 10  Gerd Dicke, “Homo facetus: Vom Mittelalter eines humanistischen Ideals,” in Humanismus in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Nicola McLelland, Stefanie Schmitt, and Hans-Jochen Schiewer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), pp. 299–332, p. 328. 11  Gerd Dicke, “Homo facetus,” p. 329. 12  Tom Licence, “The Date and Authorship of the Vita Aedwardi regis,” Anglo Saxon England 44 (2015): pp. 259–85. See also Frank Barlow, “Introduction,” in The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster, edited and translated by Frank Barlow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. xviii–xxix. 13  Notably, the text also features long digressive passages lauding the feats of King Cnut and other kings. For example, The Life of King Edward, pp. 8–14.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  61 One Easter Day, while Edward was wearing his crown and dining with his nobles, he suddenly “raised his voice in loud laughter” (vocem suam in risu exaltavit). The sound was so startling, apparently, that it caused his company great alarm. At first nobody dared to ask the king what had happened. But after dinner, Earl Harold, along with a bishop and an abbot, privately begged Edward to explain himself. Although he was reluctant, the king eventually replied. “I have seen miraculous things,” he said, “and so I did not laugh without cause” (Mira vidi, ideoque non sine causa risi). Edward said that he had seen, in his mind, the mythical “Seven Sleepers” on Mount Cheilaion, in Asia Minor, rolling over in their sleep from the right side to the left. They later sent legates to this distant mountain, only to discover that not only had the king’s vision been true, but that the king had also been accurate on many of the other smaller details of the sleepers and their appearance. Edward had explained that this act of rolling over would, according to the prophecy, now initiate seventy-four years of great change in the world. Hearing the vision, the earl and the two prelates were astonished. There could be no doubt, they thought: the laughing vision had been a genuine mystical experience.14 This same basic story would be repeated in several other biographies of Edward over the course of the twelfth century. But each time it was recalled, the emphasis on the king’s laughter seemed to change. After the anonymous Vita Aedwardi, the next major account of Edward’s life came in 1125 in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum. Among a constellation of stories of pre-Conquest politics, William recounted the same tale of the “Seven Sleepers.” Yet in his telling, William offered very little emphasis on any miraculous or prophetic dimensions of the laughter. Regurgitating a truncated version of the anonymous text, he chose instead to add one or two revealing anecdotal details. Most strikingly, the nobles in the Gesta regum are shown describing the king’s laughter as a buffoonish cackle (scurrilem cachinnum), a lowly type of laughter that was hardly befitting of a solemn prophecy.15 The king’s tone was also far more conversational in William’s account, with Edward explaining that he did not laugh without good reason as he had seen “stupendous sights” (stupenda) in his time.16 Rather than showing it as a miraculous prophecy from God, or as any kind of defining miracle of a would-be saint, Malmesbury’s laughing vision appears as something of a diversion or curiosity. This was all to change dramatically, however, in the story’s next incarnation. In the following decade, the writer Osbert of Clare (d.c.1158) set himself the project of building up King Edward’s image as a saint. No doubt this was an attractive way of enhancing the prestige of Westminster Abbey, where Osbert was the prior, 14  The Life of King Edward, pp. 102–7. 15  William of Malmesbury’s use of cachinnum is discussed below, p. 73. 16 William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, edited and  translated by Roger  A.  B.  Mynors, Rodney  M.  Thomson, and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 225, pp. 410–11.

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62  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century and where he otherwise forged charters attesting Edward’s generosity to the Church. In 1138, Osbert completed his own new version of Edward’s life, the Vita beati Eadwardi regis Anglorum, drawing on previous materials, including the ­anonymous Vita Aedwardi.17 Hoping to refine Edward’s spiritual reputation, Osbert also decided to add a few miracles and visions of his own.18 Significantly, among these was yet another story describing the king bursting into laughter as he made a prophecy.19 On the one hand, this new version replicated the essential elements of the Vita Aedwardi’s original. Again, the laughing prophecy came in a solemn religious context, this time while the Eucharist was being taken during a Whitsun mass. And once more, the king’s entourage were astonished by his laughing outburst. Yet Osbert’s story also added a vital new dimension to the legend. Repeating the basic structure of the “Seven Sleepers” episode, he reinforced the situation’s gravity. He described how the laughter “shocked” the courtiers, and how the prophecy had urgent ramifications for the safety of Edward’s England, alerting them to how Svein, the Danish king (Svein II Estridsson, r.1047–76), was attempting to invade. Significantly, Osbert also framed the laughing vision as a divine episode. By including it seamlessly among a group of the more solemn miracles in his collection, he gave it added dignity and importance. More than twenty years later, King Edward’s laughing prophecy received its final refinement from a writer close to Henry II’s circle. Aelred of Rievaulx (d.1167) produced his comprehensive Vita sancti Edwardi regis et confessoris in 1163, two years after Edward’s canonization. A fuller and more classically hagiographic version than its predecessors, Aelred’s text was widely circulated in Angevin England.20 While he included both of the laughing prophecies that we have so far seen, and while he repeated the same structure as Edward’s previous vitae, Aelred chose to amplify the king’s laughter. Not only did he make it seem more dramatic, but also more spiritual. Aelred stressed, first of all, that Edward laughed only “moderately” (in risum modicum) and hastened to add that the way he did so managed to “maintain royal dignity” (servata tamen regia gravitate). Fusing the royal with the saintly, however, Aelred showed the king explaining his laughter as having a divine origin. As his King Edward explained: By Christ’s revelation I saw this [vision]. I saw it, I laughed, and I rejoiced. The Lord made me laugh, and whoever hears will laugh with me.21 17  Frank Barlow, The Life of King Edward, pp. 157–9. 18  Osbert explained in a letter to Henry, Bishop of Winchester that, to further the king’s reputation, he had selected a number of miracle stories from the many in circulation. Osbert of Clare, Epistolae, p. 84. Cited in Frank Barlow, “Introduction,” in The Life of King Edward, pp. xxxiv–v. 19 Frank Barlow explains that Osbert might have adapted this “shoddy” anecdote from a lost ­contemporary source. See Frank Barlow, “The Vita Aedwardi (Book II): the Seven Sleepers; Some Further Evidence and Reflections,” in Frank Barlow, The Norman Conquest and Beyond (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), pp. 85–111: p. 92. 20  Frank Barlow, The Life of King Edward, pp. xxxviii–ix. 21  Aelred of Rievaulx, Vita S. Edwardii Regis et Confessoris, PL, vol. 195, cols. 748C-749D. “Haec sunt quae Christo revelante cognovi, et vidi et risi et gavisus sum. Risum enim mihi fecit Dominus, et

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  63 Whereas in Osbert’s text the laughter had appeared as almost incidental to the prophecy, now it was articulated, quite explicitly, as a medium of the prophetic expression itself. The emergence of Edward’s laughter as a transcendent force mirrored wider trends in twelfth-century writing. This was especially the case in hagiography. Although defying persecution had always been a crucial element of medieval saints’ lives, by the twelfth century hagiographers were increasingly using laughter to express a saint’s supreme invulnerability to torment. At first, this “laughter” was largely figurative. A typical example can be found in the life of Werburgh (d.700), the Anglo-Saxon saint, written by the Benedictine monk Goscelin (d.c.1107) at the beginning of the century. Like King Edward, Werburgh was a rare example of a royal saint. She was the daughter of King Wulfhere of Mercia and had lived a life of luxury before she rejected the world and joined a convent. Describing Werburgh’s good character, Goscelin said that she “laughed in the face of her suffering” (adversa ridebat patientia), and that by doing so she was able to counter her pain with an inspired “love, kindness, peace, and cheerfulness (hilaritas).”22 Although it is significant that Goscelin chose to symbolize Werburgh’s defiance with laughter, this hardly seems like anything more than a symbolic account. But over the course of the 1100s, the defiant laughter of saints became altogether more bodily and more inspired. Keeping with the theme of royal connections, a typical example appears in the vita of Saint Godfrey of Cappenburg (d.1127). Godfrey, whose brother was godfather to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (d.1189), had been a well-connected aristocrat before converting to the Premonstratensian monastic order as a young man. As he withdrew from the world, Godfrey managed to persuade his wife to follow suit and enter a convent herself. This infuriated Godfrey’s father-in-law, who accused him of “malfeasance” and began bullying him ferociously. According to the hagiographer (who wrote the vita in the 1150s), when the father-in-law threatened Godfrey violently in public, the saint was defiant and responded with a laugh. But this laughter was not simply defiant; it was deeply inspired. As the hagiographer tells us, it came to him as if he were “strengthened by a wall of conscience upon which raging madness may not breathe.”23

quicunque audierit corridebit mihi.” Note that this passage echoes Sara in Genesis 21: 6: “risum mihi fecit deus,” discussed earlier in Chapter 1. Given the context, Aelred may have had in mind glosses of Sara’s laughter that saw it as a sign of divine inspiration, such as Guibert of Nogent’s: “Sed cum post victas temptationis dominus cordi hilaritatem infundit. Tunc sara filium suscipit; que risit, quasi dicat voluntas ego in veteram inter omnes inimicos meos.” London, BL MS Add. 63077, f.38v. 22  Acta Sanctorum, Fev. I, 3rd February, BHL: 8855, col. 388C. 23  Norbert and Early Norbertine Spirituality, edited by Theodore J. Antry and Carol Neel (New York: Paulist Press, 2007), pp. 106–7; p. 99. See also Norbert of Xanten’s similar laughing response, from the Life of Norbert of Xanten, printed in the same volume, p. 169. For a later example of a similar nature, see Philip of Harveng, Vita Odae, PL, vol. 203, col. 1363, l.c.41.

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64  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Ultimately, however, the most vivid images of saintly laughter came in tales of martyrdom. A symptomatic case was the twelfth century’s resurgence of popularity for Saint Lawrence, the third-century Christian martyr who had famously asked to be turned over while he was being roasted to death. During Henry II’s reign, two new lives of Lawrence appeared, one written by Nigel Wireker (d.c.1200), an associate of Thomas Becket, and the other by an anonymous Anglo-Norman author. And significantly, both featured the saint laughing as he overcame his persecutor, Emperor Decius (d.251).24 In the Vie de Saint Laurent, the anonymous life written in vernacular verse, the saint is shown laughing with a “beautiful earnestness.” As he endured the torturous heat of the grill, Lawrence calls on God to comfort him with heavenly strength: Out of cruelty, Decius wanted to roast him right where he was. But then said Laurence, with a laugh, And with such a simple beauty in his face: “God, you in your power I praise, Who deigns to offer me comfort through this pain.”25

Later, Nigel Wireker reiterated and developed this same image in his own poetic rendition of Saint Lawrence’s suffering. Here, the “blessed” nature of Lawrence’s laughter is made more explicit. Once kindled by this, Lawrence, blessed by the fire . . . laughed in a refined way, and spurned tortures. 26

These images had deep roots in Christian culture. Defiantly laughing martyrs had been popular in the earliest saints’ lives, and particularly appeared in lives of the Roman Christians who, like Lawrence, had been persecuted under the rule of Decius. A typical example was the vita of Bishop Pionius of Smyrna, written in the late 200s. Similarly to the Lawrence legend, this work described a group of Christians who were threatened with the burning stake by their Roman persecutors. Right at the point of the story’s highest tension, when the agonies of torture were just beginning, one of the Christians, a woman named Sabina, burst into loud laughter. When asked, “Why do you laugh?” she replied, “Because it pleases God.” As she explained, “We are Christians, and whoever holds constant faith in

24  The laughter of Saint Lawrence will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 4, below, pp. 139–142. 25  De la crualté Decii/Qui vif le fait rostir issi./Dunc dist saint Lorenz en riant/O simple vult, o bel semblant:/‘Deu, tei en puisse jeo loer/Qui ci me deignas conforter. La Vie de Saint Laurent: An Anglo-Norman Poem of the Twelfth Century, edited by D. W. Russell (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1976), p. 57, l.888–93. 26  “Hoc semel accensus Laurentius igne beatus / Sparsit opes, risit mundus, sprevit cruciatus.” Nigel Wireker. The Passion of Saint Lawrence: Epigrams and Marginal Poems. Edited and translated by Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 104–5.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  65 Christ shall laugh a perpetual laughter (risu ridebunt perpetuo).”27 While these accounts had once been well known, this tradition of laughing martyrdom had not enjoyed continuous popularity, and by the eleventh and early twelfth centuries these kinds of stories had largely dropped out of favor and circulation. By ­surfacing again in the era of Henry II’s court, the laughing Saint Lawrence ­perhaps  suggests a growing connection between laughter and divine power in hagiographies. But laughter also acquired a more generally supernatural dimension in twelfthcentury narrative. Looking beyond hagiography, we can find many other stories of laughing prophets in more “secular” texts. Merlin, the mythical sorcerer at the court of King Arthur, was described by the historian Geoffrey of Monmouth as laughing while receiving ecstatic visions in precisely the same way.28 Evidently these stories made a significant impact, not least on the writers at the English royal court.29 Equally influential were the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, in which we can also find a range of laughing prophets.30 In Le Conte del Graal, Chrétien described how the young Perceval set off in hope of becoming a knight at the court of King Arthur. As he departed on his quest, he encountered the queen’s lady in waiting, who laughed in a mysterious way as she met him. “Young man,” she said, “if you live long enough, I think and believe in my heart that in this whole world there will never be . . . a better knight than yourself. This I think and feel and believe.”31 We then learn, in Chrétien’s narrative, about the shocking and powerful nature of this young woman’s laughter. Apparently, this was the first time she had laughed in over six years. In fact, a jester at the royal court had 27  Acta Sanctorum, Fev. I, 1st February, col. 44B. “Arridenteque Sabina, Ædituus & satellites eius dixerunt: Rides? Ita Deo placet, inquit illa; Christiani enim sumus: & qui fide sunt in Christum firma atque constanti, risu ridebunt perpetuo.” For the similar example of the vita of Bishop Carpus of Thyatira, see Acta Sanctorum, Avr. II, 13th April, col. 121B: “Sanctus autem Carpus suspensus subridebat: rogatusque a Praeside: Qua de causa rides, o Carpe? Respondit: Quia vidi gloriam Dei, et gavisus fui.” 28 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Life of Merlin: Vita Merlini, edited and translated by Basil Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973), pp. 65–9; and pp. 78–9. On the Vita Merlini, and Geoffrey’s creative innovations in bringing the character of Merlin out of his sparse sources, see Karen Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), pp. 78–93. For a brief discussion of Merlin’s laughter, see Albrecht Classen, “Introduction,” in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, Its Meanings, and Consequences, edited by Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 56–60. 29  Stories of Merlin’s prophecies were cited at different points by Herbert of Bosham, Gerald of Wales, Peter of Blois, Gilbert Foliot and John of Salisbury. Herbert cited one of Merlin’s prophecies in a letter to the Pope, Alexander III, suggesting that Henry II was threatening Thomas Becket with it. Gerald of Wales, meanwhile, touched on the prophecy in the Expugnatio Hibernica, II: 31, 35. Peter of Blois cited one of Merlin’s prophecies in a commentary on Job. Elsewhere, John of Salisbury attacked Gilbert Foliot, who he said had used one of the prophecies to support a dubious claim to London’s supremacy over Canterbury. These observations made in Karen Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), p. 81. On Gerald of Wales’s use of Merlin’s prophecies, see Ad Putter, “Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin,” Anglo-Norman Studies 31 (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2009), pp. 90–103. 30  Ménard recognizes this trope, although he gives few examples. Ménard, Le rire, p. 95. 31  Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail (Li Conte del Graal), or Perceval, edited by Rupert T. Pickens, translated by William W. Kibler (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 51–2, l.1039–42. “Ceste pucele ne rira / Jus que tant que elle verra / Celui qui de chevalrie / Avra tote la seignorie”

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66  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century ­ redicted that she would never laugh again until she laid eyes on the man who p would go on to become the “supreme lord among knights.” Sir Kay was evidently irritated by the prediction of the jester (who, of course, should be counted as another type of laughing prophet). But ultimately his prophecy proved to be ­correct, and the strange laughter was vindicated as a mark of the prophet’s power. Laughter also came at this point to evoke the ineffable harmonies of heaven. The Visio cuiusdam de morte sancti Thome martiris, an anonymous poem written some time near the end of the twelfth century, described heaven as a landscape full of “laughing” flowers with purple roses. As the poet explained, these flowers “laughed” not at lascivious jokes, but rather with a “pure joy at serious things” (Ridet florum . . . nec quemquam lascivia mollit in iocosis, sed sunt casta gaudia rebus seriosis).32 Why was laughter an appropriate symbol for these “serious” things in heaven? One explanation is that twelfth-century poets saw a deep link between humor and creation.33 The Hypognosticon, a poetic account of the origins of the universe by Lawrence of Durham (d.1154), twice suggested that the genesis of the world manifested a type of humor. “As the ocean ebbs and flows,” Lawrence wrote, “God has made a joke (ioca) without end.”34 And as he later added, referring to accidents of nature, “Such jokes (iocos) are often played by God's great might, which often make good use of our mishaps.”35 Hollowed out of any frivolous content, laughter could represent humor’s basic structure of revelation and triumph. Above all, these connections between laughter and nature found full force in the twelfth-century’s culture of love poetry. For many troubadour poets, there was an intuitive link between the state of nature and the condition of the ideal lover.36 As the scholar Peter Dronke has observed, “the lover finds his summer and his winter alike in the beloved.”37 Equally, they seem to have found their love magnified in all conditions of laughter. Giraut de Borneil (f.1160–1200), a 32  “Visio cuiusdam de morte sancti Thome martiris,” in Paul Gerhard Schmidt, “Die Ermordung Thomas Beckets im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Dichtungen,” Mittellateinische Jahrbuch 9 (1973): pp. 165–8. 33 See  A.  G.  Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),. p. 57. 34  Lawrence of Durham, Hypognosticon, edited by Susanne Daub (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 2002), I, ll.23–4. 35  Hypognosticon, III, ll.587–8. This line cited and translated in Rigg, Anglo-Latin Literature, p. 57. 36  Describing laughing lovers had become standard practice in twelfth-century guides for writing verse. A key model was Ovid, who had written that women should strive to laugh delicately, with only the slightest opening of the mouth, if they wanted to impress their lovers with their grace. Ovid, The Art of Love and Other Poems, edited and translated by John Henry Mozley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3: 283. This advice was later copied in twelfth-century manuals for writing poetry, notably Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars Versificatoria (c.1175), and Peter of Blois’ Libellus de arte dictandi rhetorice. Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria, (Descriptio forme pulchritudinis), p. 27. “Oris honor rosei suspirat ad oscula, risu succincto modica lege labella tument.” Peter of Blois. Libellus de arte dictandi rhetorice. In Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English Artes Dictandi and Their Tradition, edited by Martin Camargo. 45–87. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995, pp. 45–87, at p. 73. 37  Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 183.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  67 troubadour from Provence, sang in one poem how he adored the creeping in of the spring season, when the delight of “laughter and jesting and joy and song, and the tumult of sweet sound . . . grows with morning's approach.”38 Going further, a number of troubadours imagined “alluring” laughter as a power that was bestowed by nature on the ideal lover. A striking example appears in the Arundel Lyrics, written in Paris in the 1140s by the poet known as Primas. For Nature, supplying fuel for a sweeter madness, when she exhibited this girl to astound all nations, stretched out the nets of love in her alluring laugh.39

It was not simply that Primas felt the lover’s laughter expressed a human joy; rather, he saw laughter as manifesting a universal wonder at the miracle of creation. Primas was binding together and blurring the perfection of love with the perfection of nature, condensing them into a concentrated image of beatific laughter. It was a striking package, one that later motivated other writers, not least Gerald of Wales (d.1223), whose early poems described a set of idealized women, laughing in a way that was “most agreeable” (in risu gratior).40 But laughter most of all drew its power from its ambiguity, as well as from its connected tendency to defy reason. Just as love appeared to the troubadours as a lethal yet irresistible force, so laughter also represented a moment of ecstatic abandon. For Bernart of Ventadorn (fl.c.1150–80), as for other troubadour and Goliardic poets, laughter expressed the most profound or mystical sensations of love. “If I know how to sing or to laugh,” Bernart wrote in another poem, “all is accorded to me through her [his lover].”41 As Giraut de Borneil explained in one his songs, he felt an ecstatic joy whenever he laughed with his lover, something that he could not feel or attain in any other way.42 “My heart does not have joy from any other love except from one which it never saw,” the poet Jaufré Rudel (fl.1140s) sang, “nor through any joy did it laugh so much.”43 How can we explain the development and nature of the risus mysticus in twelfth-century texts? Some have dismissed its historical specificity, suggesting that connections between humor and prophecy have always been found throughout 38  Giraut de Borneil, The Cansos and Sirventes of the Troubadour Giraut de Borneil, edited and translated by Ruth Verity Sharman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), XXVII, p. 162: “E’l gaps e’l ris e’l iois e’l chanz / E’l douz mazanz / Que creis quant s’azina’l matis,” translation, p. 165. 39  The Arundel Lyrics: The Poems of Hugh Primas, edited and translated by Christopher J. McDonough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), IV, pp. 22–3. “Nam Natura, dulcioris alimenta dans erroris dum in stuporem populis hanc omnibus ostendit, in risu blando retia Veneria tetendit.” (I have adapted McDonough’s translation). 40  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, Symbolum Electorum, 2, p. 351. 41  Bernart de Ventadorn, A Bilingual Edition of the Love Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, edited and translated by Ronnie Apter, with additional translations by Mark Herman (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), pp. 180–1. 42  Giraut de Borneil, The Cansos and Sirventes of the Troubadour Giraut de Borneil, edited and translated by Ruth Verity Sharman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), XLII, pp. 249–50. 43  Jaufré Rudel, The Songs of Jaufré Rudel, edited and translated by Rupert  T.  Pickens (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978), VI: “No sap cantar qui so non di”, version 2, pp. 226–7.

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68  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century the long lineage of European folklore.44 More expansively, other scholars have observed parallels between medieval prophetic laughter and anecdotal tales from across world history, from India to Hawaii to the Baltic Sea.45 Whatever these deeper origins of the motif, it is clear that individual medieval authors worked to develop and popularize the theme in the 1100s. As we have seen, the likes of Osbert of Clare and Aelred of Rievaulx gave the image of Edward the Confessor’s laughing prophecies an explicitly Christian articulation and elaboration that was lacking in earlier incarnations of his vita.46 Other hagiographers evidently imitated these and other models in the process of developing a range of new laughing martyrs and saints. Troubadours notoriously aped one another’s styles and tropes, and we can observe images of laughing lovers spreading, like a wild fire, from the poetry of William of Aquitaine right through to the songs of Bernart of Ventadorn. Ultimately, however, it may be impossible to pin down any precise causation for the spread of the risus mysticus, beyond connecting it with the wider intellectual and conceptual trends identified in the previous chapter. Albrecht Classen recently made the case that enigmatic laughter often symbolized “a wise person . . . perceiv[ing] the whole truth” of a situation in medieval narrative.47 While this seems broadly correct, it does not quite capture the mechanism of the risus mysticus. Most importantly, it does not account for the motif ’s explicitly spiritual dimension. Although laughter came to be associated with mystical wisdom, in many of the cases we have seen it also flagged to readers of a text that a person had been momentarily touched by a form of divine providence.48 When martyrs in hagiographies laughed while being tortured or killed, or when saints laughed defiantly in the face of abuse, laughter became a means for expressing a unique kind of inspired transcendence, one made all the more powerful by its apparent disconnection from pain and suffering. Parallel to this, discussions of nature often used laughter to symbolize the harmony of creation, even suggesting in some cases that God laughed while enacting natural miracles. Similarly, the love poetry of the troubadours drew a poetic thread between divine love and an ecstatic, heavenly type of laugh. While each of these images in isolation might

44  For instance, the folkloricists Aarne and Thomson identified connections between laughter and revelation in a number of different legends and tales throughout global history. Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, 3 vols. FF Communications 284–6 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004), e.g., vol. 1, #408, pp. 241–3; and vol. 1, #607, pp. 365–6. 45  N. M. Penzer, ed. The Ocean of Story: C. H. Tawney’s translation of Somadeva’s Katha Sarit Sagara, vol. 1 (London: Chas. J. Sawyer, 1926)), pp. 46–9. 46  Albert Wesselski has also identified how many tales from the thirteenth century that featured laughing prophecy took their influence from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin. Albert Wesselski, Mönchslatein (Leipzig: Wilhelm Heims, 1909), p. 254. 47  Albrecht Classen, “Introduction,” in Laughter in the Middle Ages, pp. 56–60. 48  Max Wehrli, Literatur im deutschen Mittelalter: eine poetologische Einführung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), p. 173, also points out a more general spiritual dimension to laughter in German medieval narratives. In particular, he identifies moments of divine humor (cited by Classen, p. 58).

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  69 give a compelling sense of the power of mystical laughter in imaginative literature, when considered together they point to persistent connections with an ineffable spiritual power. Increasingly, when writers such as the biographers of Edward the Confessor depicted laughter, they were linking it with mysticism, divinity, and transcendence.

Risus Blasphemus: The Sudden Death of William II (d.1100) Perhaps the archetypal blasphemous king in twelfth-century English chronicles was William the Conqueror’s son and heir, William II (r.1087–1100). Saint Anselm of Canterbury once referred to King William (nicknamed “Rufus,” perhaps for his ruddy complexion) as the “jeering prince.”49 This reputation for frivolity and disrespect would ripple across the works of twelfth-century historians. Rufus was a king who divided opinions. Many writers condemned him, in later years, for his flippant treatment of the Church, and for what they thought of as his careless courtliness.50 Certainly, as his firm supporters and vicious detractors all agreed, William was keen on making jokes. In the chronicles and narratives of his reign, he frequently laughed with, and perhaps more often at, his subjects.51 There is even a possibility that his nickname “Rufus” was a reference to the red clothes that were ordinarily worn by jesters and buffoons.52 Yet in some historical accounts the king’s laughter had an emphatically supernatural dimension. According to one historian, when King William laughed in the face of divine warnings, it was a laugh that would prove to be deadly. William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum, a widely-read version of Rufus’s final days, suggested that it was, in fact, the king’s laughter that caused him to be killed. Malmesbury described how Rufus began in his last weeks to receive dire omens. The devil, he said, began appearing in nearby forests, and a spring in the Berkshire village of Hampstead ran with blood for two weeks. Instead of treating these warnings seriously, Rufus simply laughed at them, “caring nothing.”53 Yet he would live to see only one more omen. On the eve of a hunting trip, Rufus received a 49  Anselm of Canterbury, Opera Omnia, edited by Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, vol. 3 (StuttgartBad-Cannstatt: Verlag, 1984), letter 2, p. 101, “Principe suo irridente.” On Anselm’s conflict with King William, see Frank Barlow, William Rufus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 373–4. 50  C. Warren Hollister, “The Strange Death of William Rufus,” Speculum 48: 4 (1973): pp. 637–53. 51  Gaimar, who lauded William as the model of a chivalrous king, depicted him laughing several times. William of Malmesbury, meanwhile, was deeply divided over the sacred significance of the king’s wit, but never once denied at least the basic truth of his frequent jesting and laughter. These will be cited below. 52  On William’s nickname and reputation more generally, see Emma Mason, King Rufus: The Life and Murder of William II of England (Stroud: History Press, 2012), pp. 1–12. 53  William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum, 331, pp. 570–1. There was clearly some issue with the description here of the king laughing. The “TA” version of the GP, according to Thomson’s schema, has the word garriebat instead of ridebat. But London, BL MS Royal 13 D. ii. (the “C” version) reads: “Audiebat ille hec et ridebat,” fol. 79v.

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70  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century message from a foreign abbot. One of the abbot’s monks, Robert Fitz Hamon, had had a terrifying vision, seeing the king storming into a church and gnashing on a crucifix. Miraculously, the miniature of Christ then sprang into life and kicked the king. William, apparently, burst into flames. Rufus again shrugged off the warning with a laugh. As Malmesbury wrote, “the king roared with laughter (at ille cachinnos ingeminans), ‘He’s a monk,’ he said, ‘and has these monkish dreams.’ ” (‘Monachus’ inquit ‘est . . . monachiliter somniat’).54 On the hunt the next day, however, the king was wounded by a stray arrow. He was found lying in agony, having lost all power of speech (sed quia nec sensum nec vocem hausit), and died shortly thereafter. The episode may well have illustrated that classic medieval theme, that “pride comes before a fall.”55 But an irreducible facet of that pride, certainly in the way Malmesbury told the tale, was the king’s mocking laughter. In fact, this was not the only anecdote in William’s writing where Rufus was struck down with a punishment immediately after laughing. In his Gesta pontificum (c.1126), Malmesbury related how the king had swept away with a guffaw (cachinno) the solemn difficulties of electing his archbishop.56 While the bishops of England had implored him to choose Anselm, Rufus “answered them jokingly, with a laugh concealing his anger” (respondit ludibundus, risu iram dissimulans). “You can pray what you wish,” he replied, “I will do what I like: no one's prayers will ever shake my resolve.” Making fun of their request, he responded that he would ignore Anselm’s “holy face,” and make himself archbishop instead. Following these jocular (ludibundus) remarks, Malmesbury explained, the king was suddenly struck with a heavy pain. “He said this sort of thing many a time, but soon fell seriously ill (morbi graven persensit). The illness growing worse, he took to his bed.” Now forced into solemnity, William finally agreed to elect Anselm as archbishop.57 Punishing people for their wicked laughter was a favorite theme in William of Malmesbury’s historical writing. Throughout his works, William described a whole range of figures being struck down by supernatural forces after laughing inappropriately. And in many of these tales William often left a signature touch of personal judgment, making explicit his view that the laughter was contrary to God’s will. In his Gesta pontificum, he described how one “man of poor faith” laughed at Bishop Aelheah, publicly mocking him by using obscene and “common expressions” (vulgari verbo), all while questioning the bishop’s chastity and continence. “You sadden me, poor man,” Aelheah replied, “for you do not know 54  William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum, 333, pp. 572–5. Note that Suetonius had described prod­ igies and prophecies leading up to the Emperor Caligula’s death in a similar way. According to Suetonius the first omen, which the emperor also dismissed, came when a statue of Jupiter at Olympia let out a huge peal of laughter (“tantum cachinnum repente edidit”). Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, vol. 1, 4: 57, pp. 500–1. 55  C. Warren Hollister, “The Strange Death of William Rufus,” p. 637. 56  William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum: The History of the English Bishops, edited and translated by Michael Winterbottom and Rodney M. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), vol. 1, 48: 2, pp. 116–19. 57  William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, vol. 1, 48: 4, pp. 118–19.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  71 what tomorrow will bring.” Sure enough, the very next day the man was found strangled to death in his room. As William explained, his throat had been punished by the devil (a diabolo guttur elisus).58 Occasionally William even suggested that mocking laughter could raise the dead. Among his gallery of punishable mockers was another laughing king: Cnut, the Danish king who ruled England from 1016 to 1035. In one of William’s more bizarre anecdotes, King Cnut received a macabre surprise after laughing at a saint. While he was apparently scornful of all English saints, the king made a special point of mocking Edith of Wilton. Cnut apparently exploded with laughter (cachinnos effudit) whenever he passed by her shrine, taunting worshippers gathered there. Aethelnoth, Cnut’s archbishop, made a spirited defense of Saint Edith’s sanctity. In answer, the king took the mockery even further. He asked for Edith’s remains to be dug up, so that everybody could witness the unholy imperfection of her body for themselves. But the laughter faded as the tomb was opened. When the tomb was broken into, Edith was seen to emerge as far as the waist, though her face was veiled, and to launch herself at the contumacious king. In his fright, he drew his head right back; his knees gave way, and he collapsed to the ground. The fall so shattered him that for some time his breathing was impeded, and he was judged dead. But gradually strength returned and he felt both shame and joy that despite his stern punishment he had lived to repent.59

While this was a shocking episode, it followed a deliberate pattern. It was no coincidence that William described Cnut’s breathing, specifically, being punished by the zombie Edith. Throughout a wide range of twelfth-century narratives, supernatural forces often appeared to attack the throat or speaking apparatus of people who had laughed with disrespect, as we saw previously with William Rufus. Hildebert of Lavardin (d.1133) wrote about a monk whose laughter made him foam at the mouth. The monk had often enjoyed laughing and making idle jokes, Hildebert wrote, but his abbot sternly warned him that if he did not stop then his mouth, in particular, would be punished by God.60 Soon afterwards he laughed again, foam frothed around his tongue, and the monk was apparently unable to laugh any more. Reginald of Durham’s Life of Saint Godric included a similar account of a monk possessed by an evil spirit who made him laugh raucously (cachinino). As the monk laughed his throat, mouth, and face suddenly became swollen, leaving him speechless.61 A little later in the 1100s, Aelred of 58 William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, II: 75, 30–1 pp. 260–1. This particular story of Aelheah is unique to the GP and does not feature in any other source recording the life of the bishop. 59  William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, 87: 7–9, pp. 298–9. Thomson observes that this story is unique to the GP, and is very different in Goscelin’s Translatio S. Edithae, where Cnut is described as having devotion for Edith. Rodney Thomson’s notes in Gesta pontificum, vol. 2, p. 135. 60  Acta Sanctorum, Avr. III, 29th April, BHL: 4010, p. 640, col. 640A. 61  Libellus de vita et miraculis S.  Godrici, edited by J.  Stevenson, Surtees Society 20 (London/ Edinburgh, 1847), ch. 234, p. 248.

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72  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Rievaulx wrote about a girl who became cursed after she had mocked the tomb of Saint Edward the Confessor. Following her scoffing laughter, the girl was “seized by a paralytic stroke,” Aelred said. Now her “blaspheming mouth” (os blasphemum) became twisted until she was totally “deprived of the tongue she had misused” (linguae quo fuerat abusa privavit).62 Blasphemous laughter was clearly something that could provoke violent miraculous interventions in human affairs.63 Often disrespectful laughers were shown being struck down by miraculous blows from heaven, as if God himself was offended by their laughter. Guibert of Nogent recalled a traumatic episode in his autobiography of how a frivolous monk was once hit by a bolt of lightning. Startlingly, the lightning seems to have sought him out even as he hid in a church. That morning, when he had heard the first claps of thunder, the monk had joked about the storm. But, as Guibert wrote, “as soon as he entered the church he was struck by the very fire he had scorned.”64 The same structure can be found in Albert of Aachen’s account of the First Crusade (c.1119), in which a group of Saracens who mocked a sacred Christian relic were soon after suffocated in a cloud of dust.65 A range of twelfth-century narratives also showed laughing figures being punished by the onset of sudden illnesses, along similar lines to the ailments suffered by Malmesbury’s King William.66 Often writers described this sickness as mirroring the offense, making an apt retribution for how the person had originally laughed. Orderic Vitalis, for instance, described a monk named Audinus who fell “severely” ill and died after he had “severely” mocked the tomb of the Earl Waltheof.67 Even more symmetrical was the example featured in the Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick, a popular hagiography from the second half of the 1100s, in which a man laughed mockingly at a blind person and in retaliation was blinded by a divine force.68 Most often, however, when laughter was punished by a

62  Aelred of Rievaulx, Vita S. Edwardii Regis et Confessoris, PL vol. 195, col. 783C-784A. 63  Disrespectful laughter was also punished by individual acts of violence in medieval narrative. See, for example, Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, edited and translated by Ian Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 144–5; Robert of Torigni, Chronica, edited by Rochard Howlett, vol. 4 (London: Rolls Series, 1889), p. 147; Roger of Howden, Chronica, edited by William Stubbs, vol. 3 (London: Rolls Series, 1869), pp. 142–3; Walter Map, De nugis curialium, edited by M.  R.  James, Christopher N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2: 24, p. 191. 64  Guibert of Nogent, Monodiae, PL vol. 156, col. 886C-D. “. . . statimque intrans ecclesiam ictum illum quem risit excepit.” 65  Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana: History of the Journey to Jerusalem, edited and translated by Susan B. Edgington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), Book 10, ch. 48, pp. 762–3. 66  William of Malmesbury’s motif of punishable laughter seems to have been highly influential. Orderic Vitalis’s Rufus similarly laughed at omens and warnings shortly before he was killed in the New Forest. Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), vol. 5, pp. 288–90. Also, Ralph Niger (d.1217) repeated the anecdote in Ralph Niger, Radulfi Nigri Chronica: The Chronicles of Ralph Niger, edited by Robert Anstruther (London: Caxton Society, 1851), II, pp. 163–4. 67  Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, book IV, pp. 348–9. 68  Tripartite Life of St Patrick, edited by Whitley Stokes (Rolls Series, 1887), I, p. 133. For a discussion of blindness as a divine punishment for sins in the work of medieval writers, see Joy Hawkins,

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  73 sickness it was because somebody had laughed at a saint. Usually, the illness itself was held as a measure of the strength and importance of the saint in question. According to the early twelfth-century Vita of Adelelmus of Burgos, a priest who laughed at the cult of the Saint Adelelm suffered because he had mocked an especially potent holy figure. “Such was the remarkable power (virtus) of the saint,” the writer explained, that the priest was struck down with gout.69 A single alteration in one of William of Malmesbury’s manuscripts tells a ­fascinating story of just how powerful disrespectful laughter was felt to be. His own autographed manuscript of the Gesta pontificum contains several redactions, passages in which the author chose to personally remove or alter inflammatory material. Examining one passage we can see that the manuscript originally described how William Rufus had immediately “cackled” in laughter (subinde cachinnate rege) at one of his opponents. Later, however, Malmesbury altered this wording. Taking out his knife, he scraped out the word “cachinnate” and replaced it with the more moderate word for laughter, “ridente.” He achieved this change a little clumsily, stretching a long ligature between the “d” and the “te” from the original word in order to fully cover the gap.70 The historian Sigbjorn Sønnesyn, observing similar alterations dealing with William Rufus in the Gesta regum, has dismissed these changes as minor linguistic alterations.71 But in this case, the effort involved in such a small alteration is suggestive. Was cachinnum such a provocative word that William felt it must be changed? What was the implied distance between cachinnate and ridente? Looking widely, it appears that the word cachinnum had a dark resonance in the narrative landscape of the 1100s. Specifically, loud laughter was often associated with degeneration, demonic possession, or the wailing of animals and monsters. Associations between cachinnum and hellish demons, on the one hand, went a long way back through Christian history. As early as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (c.731), we can find a vivid evocation of the word’s power in a tale of a Northumbrian man who had journeyed into Hell. All around the pilgrim, Bede said, the mighty lamentations of the damned mingled in a cacophony with the loud cackling (cachinnans) of demons. As the visionary explained, the sound of the hellish

“Seeing the Light? Blindness and Sanctity in Later Medieval England,” Studies in Church History 47 (2011): pp. 148–58. 69  Acta Sanctorum, Jan. II, 30th January, Caput III (alia miracula), p. 1058. 70  Oxford, Magdalen College MS Lat. 172, fol.69r. 71 Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn, William of Malmesbury and the Ethics of History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), p. 214. Note that Paul Hayward also describes William’s similar alteration of Gesta pontificum, I: 71.2ß as a “more ingenious [way] of pitching his abuse.” Paul Antony Hayward, “The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Innuendo and Legerdemain in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum and Gesta pontificum Anglorum,” Anglo Norman Studies 33, edited by C. P. Lewis (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), pp. 75–102, pp. 79–80.

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74  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century cachinnum blended seamlessly with the wailing of the damned in his ears, so much so that eventually they became indistinguishable from each other.72 But these diabolical associations found a new force in the literature of the 1100s. Now the characters described laughing with a cachinnum were usually either ­devils themselves, or else were under the influence of evil spirits.73 Milo Crispin’s Life of Lanfranc (c.1140s) describes a young boy who fell under a demonic spell. Transfixed, the boy now laughed (cachinnum) while shouting insults at Saint Lanfranc.74 Sometimes writers even articulated the line between demonic and virtuous behavior simply through the difference between cachinnum and ridens. A manuscript in the Bodleian Library contains a Cistercian exemplum in which a French man was possessed by demons. He had become puffed up with pride after going off to study at university, and spent his days laughing (cachinnum) with “concupiscent cries.” Realizing that the man was under demonic influence, a wise priest worked tirelessly to help him. He exorcised the spirits, and eventually restored him to “moral order.” Upon being saved the man then took up the Cistercian habit, and the story says that for the rest of his life he only ever laughed (ridens) “in a religious and saintly manner” (nunquam postea ridens in tota vita sua sed religiose et sanctissime).75 Elsewhere in twelfth-century literature the cachinnum also came to symbolize a more general physical degeneration of the body. Again and again, throughout a range of texts, we find precisely this kind of laughter paired with descriptions of human deformity or debasement.76 Robert of Cricklade (fl.1170), a writer within the court circle of Henry II, wrote in his ethical treatise the De Connubio Patriarchae Iacob a warning about how young monastic converts often wandered into error through their pride. Their inward corruption was mirrored when they laughed (cachinnum), which Robert said deformed the face to be just as “ugly as their spirits.”77 Apparently this peril applied equally to the old as it did the young. A book of “secular abuses,” extant in a manuscript from the University of Montpellier, catalogued the cachinnum among the many sins that plagued the elderly. Warning 72 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, edited and translated by Roger A. B. Mynors and Bertram Colgrave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Book V, ch. 12. 73  For other examples of the cachinnum’s diabolical associations, see Rodulfus Glaber, The Five Books of the Histories, edited and translated by John France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Historiarum Libri Quinque, Book 4, ch. 6, pp. 202–3; and Reginald of Durham, Libellus de vita et miraculis S. Godrici, edited by Joseph Stevenson (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1847), for example, ch. 62, p. 75; ch. 65, p. 77; ch. 338, p. 358; and ch. 248, p. 262. 74  Vita of Lanfranc of Bec, Auctore Milone Crispino, Acta Sanctorum, Mai. VI, 28th May, BHL: 4719, C.2:11, cols. 846C-D. Libellus de vita et miraculis S. Godrici, for example, ch. 62, p. 75; ch. 65, p. 77; ch. 338, p. 358; and ch. 248, p. 262. 75  Oxford, Bodleian MS Auct. D. 2. 12, f.88r. 76 M.A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1999), discusses how Alan of Lille personified laughter in his Anticlaudianus, as a virtue that “uttered no deforming guffaws,” p. 4. 77  London, BL MS Royal 8 E. II (De Connubio Patriarchae Iacob), ff.95v-96r. “. . . efferati deformiter in chachinno.”

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  75 against “coughs of vulgar laughter” (tussis cacinnat), the author cautioned that this behavior was an “aberration of natural human dignity,” a vice that despoiled the appearance of the body in the winter years of life.78 Intriguingly, the slip from ridens to cachinnum (or other kinds of raucous laughing) was also often used to define the boundary between human and animal. At the root of this image was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which circulated widely among the intellectual and poetic communities of the 1100s. Whenever Ovid mentioned loud or frantic laughter throughout the Metamorphoses, he usually did so while referring to beasts, such as Io the heifer or Callisto the bear, whose laughter accompanied their transmogrification from human form.79 A typical example was the story of the daughters of Pierus. Here, Ovid described nine girls who all spent their time laughing (rident) in jest. But one day, as the girls were laughing at the top of their lungs (magno clamore), they began to sprout feathers and grow beaks. They had morphed into a unique species of bird, one that Ovid said would always preserve the girls’ raucous cries (raucaque garrulitas) in its cries.80 Ovid’s associations echoed throughout twelfth-century literature.81 As the Chartrian poet Bernard Sylvester remarked in his Cosmographia (c.1148), when people laughed in a boisterous way, he perceived them as undergoing metamorphosis. “In laughter, man is shown in a deformed image,” he said, with “his nature degenerating to that of an ape” (Prodiit in risus hominum deformis ymago. Simea nature degenerantis homo).82 Similar powerful images continued to be invoked by later poets and writers who confronted the natural world. When the theologian and naturalist Alexander Neckham (d.1217) detailed the loud squawking laughter of parrots, horses, and apes, he could not help but hear echoes of human cries.83 And the comparison went both ways, as Alexander thought that apes also, in turn, imitated the noisy laughter of humans when they cried (simia . . . mentira risus, humanos fingere gestus).84 Ultimately, this blurring of humans with animals even spread into the minds of the most refined bishops. According to a letter sent to the scholar Gerhoh of Reichersberg by Eberhard, the bishop of Bamberg (d.1170), when people laughed (cachinnum) they seemed to “take on the manners of the foxes.”85 78  Montpellier, Bibliothèque de Médecine MS H540, f.269r. 79 Ovid, Metamorphoses, I: 741; IV: 481; XIV: 64. Juvenal’s Satires, in a related way, described the gaping rictus laugh of the senile, whose mouths hang open “like a baby swallow.” Juvenal, Satires, 10: c.230. 80 Ovid, Metamorphoses, edited and translated by Frank Justus Miller and G. P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), V, 669–78. 81 On anxieties about metamorphosis in twelfth-century texts, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” Speculum 73: 4 (1998): pp. 987–1013. 82  Bernard Sylvestris, Cosmographia, edited by Peter Dronke (Leiden: Brill, 1978), p. 110, l. 227–8. The line is cited in a poem from the 1190s contained in Oxford, Digby MS 53, f.44r. 83  Alexander Neckham, Suppletio Defectum, pp. 11–12, l. 67; pp. 82–3, l.1297–300. 84  Alexander Neckham, Suppletio Defectum, pp. 78–9, ll. 1227–28. 85  Gerhoh of Reichersberg, Epistolae, PL vol. 193, cols. 526C-527A. “. . . cachinnus insipientium qui, dum ratione se deficere praesentiunt more vulpium.”

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76  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century For William of Malmesbury, choosing to describe the king laughing cachinnate rather than ridente was therefore a crucial matter. More than just a difference in tone, the two words represented the difference between a mild reprimand and a dehumanizing condemnation. Immersed as he was in the literary culture of the early 1100s, Malmesbury would have known very well the cachinnum’s deep associations with animality and degeneration. The fact that cachinnum implicitly associated the king with other beings—devils, animals, and the morally and physically deformed—that were all thought to be rejected from the scheme of salvation history would have significant implications in descriptions of King William Rufus. And this, ultimately, is why it would have been so important for Malmesbury to edit Rufus’s cachinnum out of his own autograph manuscripts. On the one hand, the prevalence of the motif of the risus blasphemus in texts of the 1100s may not be such a surprise. Saints, after all, had been shown overcoming wicked kinds of laughter since the very first Christian hagiographies. And these connections between loud laughter and damnation in medieval literature echo the more general observations that have elsewhere been well made by art historians such as Willibald Sauerländer, by literary scholars such as Albrecht Classen, and by historians such as Laurence Mouliner.86 But, although it was widely understood that people would suffer for their laughter in the afterlife, the risus blasphemus gave the idea a graspable physical reality. Indeed, the most remarkable feature of the motif was its narrative mechanism, which framed wicked laughter as being followed immediately by a divine punishment. Across a wide range of narrative texts, whenever a person was shown laughing at holy figures or objects, or at monks, relics, or prophecies, they were very often shown being punished soon afterwards with a miraculous strike against their bodies. It was as if wicked laughter truly had a power that could trigger an instant and dramatic divine intervention in the present life. While Luke’s Gospel said that “He who laughs now will come to weep,” in many ways these moments gave this biblical logic a vivid narrative form.

Risus Regalis: William Rufus Redacted and Revised Although many accounts of William Rufus’s laughter carried these diabolical associations, over the course of the twelfth century the reputation of the king’s humor also took on a parallel life. Following the original versions of the Gesta regum and the Gesta pontificum in the 1130s, alternative narratives began to appear, some of which chose to make Rufus’s laughter appear in a far more

86  Willibald Sauerländer, “Vom Gelächter des Teufels zur Ironie der Philosophen, Über das Lachen im Spiegel der Bilder,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 39 (1976): 167–92, 30–70; Albrecht Classen, “Laughter as an Expression,” pp. 1–140; Laurence Moulinier, “Quand le Malin fait de l’esprit: Le rire au Moyen Age vu depuis l’hagiographie,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 52: 3 (1997): pp. 457–75.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  77 positive light. In these revisions we can grasp the outline of a third type of laughter. Here we have the “laughing king” or rex regalis, whose joking and laughing is presented as a testament to his acumen and accomplished political skill.87 In the final section of this chapter, I will explore two versions of this politically astute laughing King William, one from the Estoire of Gaimar, the other, perhaps surprisingly, from the redacted and revised manuscripts of William of Malmesbury. In the process, we will see how stylized laughter could also contribute to building images of powerful charismatic figures in narrative works. As we saw earlier, William of Malmesbury personally altered several small sections of his historical texts at some point in the 1130s.88 His motivations seem to have been political, and usually resulted in minor revisions of tone and wording. Yet in one particular revision he made a wholesale substitution, removing an entire paragraph and replacing it with a new one. Significantly, this was a passage in which he had originally criticized William Rufus for his inappropriate laughter and flippant jokes. But no thought of God, no holiness in any man, could curb his outspokenness; everything that was said to him he turned aside with a burst of anger or witty (as he thought them) remarks. This was made clear during this period.89

Revising the manuscript, Malmesbury replaced this passage with one that, quite conversely, praised the former king for his skillful use of wit and laughter. Now, as he explained, King William’s wit should be seen as a great sign of his flexible power: Indeed it should be seen as a further sign of greatness in the king that, though he could have carried every point by exercising naked power, he preferred to turn some things aside with a jest, resorting to sallies of wit rather than making a decision.90

It is curious that William implied that the king’s joking acted as a kind of “covered” power, or a royal power exercised by more covert means. This is a complex image of laughter’s unique political capacity that we will revisit later. But what makes this substitution especially illuminating is its emphasis on tone rather than substance. Instead of expunging the underlying fact of the king’s joking, Malmesbury felt that he was able instead to alter the terms by which it was judged. By looking

87  Jacques Le Goff, as far as I am aware, introduced the term “rex facetus” into historical discourse in his articles cited passim. 88  See the brief discussion in Rodney Thomson, Gesta pontificum, vol. 2, pp. xxiv-xxv. 89  “Licet nulla Dei consideratio, nulla cuiuscumque hominis sanctitas eius proteruiam sedare possent, adeo cuncta quae sibi dicebantur vel turbida ira vel facetis ut sibi videbatur salibus eludebat. Quod his diebus propalatum est.” William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, pp. 118–19: (sec.1.48). The alteration can be seen in Oxford, Magdalen College MS Lat. 172: fol.27r. 90  “Nam et hoc in rege magnificum videri debet, quod qui omnia pro potestate facere posset, magis quaedam ioco eludebat, ad sales multa extra iuditium animi transferens.” William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, pp. 118–19.

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78  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century at the joking from a practical rather than a moral perspective, he chose to strip it of any negative spiritual connotations. No longer a sign of the king’s godlessness or lack of sanctity (nulla Dei consideratio, nulla . . . sanctitas), now in the revised version his laughter became a mark of his political merit. The result was a description of Rufus’s behavior that managed to justify it by making it conform with a growing motif in historical literature: the pragmatic political jest. William of Malmesbury’s revisions are testament to a series of changes that were rapidly transforming the writing of English history in the 1100s. Perhaps alluding to a shift in sensibilities, the poet Gaimar (who was active around the same time as William) wrote of his ambition to capture aspects of King Henry I that other writers had left out, such as his “fine festivities” and jokes (gabeis).91 Working under the influence of Suetonius, Seneca, and other classical authors, both William of Malmesbury and Gaimar were part of a new generation of writers who were beginning to pay closer attention to the role of character and temperament in the lives of powerful figures.92 Particularly influential in this regard was Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars (c.121 ad), which had reserved a special place for the laughter of “kings.” Augustus’s success as a ruler, Suetonius had explained, was partly due to his ability to laugh at himself and tolerate the jokes of his friends and critics alike.93 Suetonius also praised Vespasian for how he managed to deflect criticism with memorable jokes and the quick use of a sharp wit.94 The influence of the Lives of the Caesars grew throughout the 1100s. In 1119, the Bishop of Norwich Herbert Losinga complained that Suetonius’s manuscripts could not be found anywhere in England, but by the mid-twelfth century scores of copies were in circulation throughout the country.95 In 1159, John of Salisbury was able to repeat Suetonius’s advice on royal laughter verbatim, alongside a range of other material taken directly from the Lives of the Caesars, in his Policraticus.96 Following this trend, two later versions of William Rufus’s life sought to resurrect the reputation of the king’s political laughter in a decidedly Suetonian manner.

91 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, pp. 352–3, l.6508–18. 92 On the impact of Suetonius, see G.  B.  Townend, “Suetonius and his Influence,” in Latin Biography, edited by T.  A.  Dorey (London, 1967),; and Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing, pp. 79–112, p. 221. For a discussion of the reception of Suetonius in medieval writing more generally, see Ruth Morse, “Medieval Biography: History as a Branch of Literature,” The Modern Language Review 80: 2 (1985): 257–68. 93 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, vol. 1, translated by J.  C.  Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library 31 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 2: 56, pp. 234–5. Note, however, that Suetonius was harsher on Nero for adopting the same strategy: Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, vol. 2, translated by J.  C.  Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library 38 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 6: 39, pp. 156–7. 94 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, vol. 2, 8: 22–3, pp. 298–301. 95  Epistolae Herberti de Losinga primi episcopi Norwicensis, edited by R. Anstruther (Brussels and London, 1846), letter 5, p. 7. 96  Birger Munk Olsen, “The Production of the Classics in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Medieval Manuscripts of the Latin Classics: Production and Use, edited by C. A. Chavannes-Mazel and M. M. Smith (London, 1996), pp. 1–17, p. 4; John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 3: 14.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  79 Both Orderic Vitalis (d.c.1142) and Gaimar characterized King William as a ­figure who joked and laughed shrewdly in his political affairs. Although Orderic’s Historia ultimately condemned Rufus, it is significant that the historian still found room in his exhaustive chronicle to praise the king’s laughter. In a section written sometime in the later 1130s, Orderic described William being greeted by a throng of appreciative clergy and laity in the port of Toques in Normandy. Apparently, William laughed kindly (respondit ridens) when he saw their welcome and answered their questions in a way that brought joy to the crowd.97 This was very much part of a character sketch that emphasized the reason and good temperament of the monarch. Elsewhere, Orderic lingered on the detail of William laughing in celebration with his associates after they had defeated the rebellion made by the nefarious political rival, Robert of Mowbray.98 Specifically, Orderic stressed that Rufus had just defeated an enemy renowned for a “love of cruelty and murder,” highlighting his laughing and joking as a sign of his triumph. Far from embedding any moral reproach in these descriptions of laughter, he emphasized the justness of William’s attitude. But it was Gaimar’s vernacular verse history, the Estoire des Engleis (c.1135–1140), that went the furthest in praising the laughter of King William. Injecting political history with his charismatic poetic verse, the Estoire was a text that circulated throughout the politically influential circles of Henry II’s England.99 Among a range of lively accounts attesting to William’s effective kingship, Gaimar included an anecdote that commended his delicate humor in glowing terms.100 When dealing with the rebellious Earl Hugh of Chester, he said, the king disarmed a possibly dangerous affront to his authority by laughing at him. Hugh had refused to show his debt of service to William in the ritual of sword-bearing, maintaining that he was not prepared to act as anyone’s servant. According to Gaimar, the king laughed at this with amusement (Li reis s’en rist si fu joiant), and jokingly asked Hugh if he would prefer instead to take up the golden royal staff and explain to everyone why he deserved the same rank as royalty.101 Chastened, Hugh answered wittily that he would happily take the staff for a while, if only to relieve the king 97  Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 5, 10: 10, pp. 256–6. “Et quia ex insperato respondit ridens percunctantibus, admiratio exorta est mox et laetitia omnibus.” 98  Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 4, 8: 23, pp. 278–9. 99 John Gillingham in particular has emphasized Gaimar’s popularity among twelfth-century readers. Although the text only survives today in four manuscripts, its opinions, structure, and language endured long enough for it to be followed in many details by the enormously popular Brut (c.1300). As Gillingham also notes, in the book’s epilogue, Gaimar dedicates the Estoire to notable contemporaries, including King Henry I, Earl Robert of Gloucester, and a number of important canons and archdeacons; a list of luminaries to which Gillingham adds William of Newburgh and Richard FitzNigel, who owned copies of the text. John Gillingham, “Gaimar, the Prose Brut and the Making of English History,” in L’Histoire et les nouveaux publics dans l’Europe médiévale, edited by Jean-Philippe Genêt (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), pp. 165–76. 100  Ian Short, “Introduction,” in Geffrei Gaimar: Estoire des Engleis, edited and translated by Ian Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xv. 101 Gaimar, Estoire, pp. 326–9, l.6005–54.

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80  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century from the exhausting weight of all his rightful royal regalia. According to Gaimar, the king was so pleased by this witty reply that in 1093 he granted Hugh power over all of North Wales, while bestowing on his heirs the honor of being royal staff holders in perpetuity. Essential to this tale was the pivotal role of the king’s laughter. Rufus’s joke was effective because it managed to defuse the tension generated by Hugh’s defiance. It was yet more successful because, echoing Suetonius’s praise of Augustus Caesar’s ability to take a joke in good spirit, it effectively demonstrated that the king had sufficient power to be able to laugh off a threat without feeling endangered. As Stephen Jaeger has pointed out, this kind of political accommodation of potentially subversive humor in fact more often offered courtiers a “palpable assurance” that the king was truly in control of his subjects.102 Notably, at the time Gaimar wrote this passage he was actively engaged himself in brokering a peaceful resolution in the contemporary conflict between a later king (Stephen) and a later Earl of Chester (Ranulf II).103 Within this context, it may not be a stretch to suggest that Gaimar was actively seeking to promote laughter’s power as a method of political diplomacy and peacemaking.104 Gaimar also celebrated William Rufus’ effective use of humor in maintaining good relations at court. Typically, joking was shown as a gesture that managed to build bridges in a way that words alone may not manage. When a group of squires with unusually cropped hairstyles arrived as royal guests, Gaimar described how “the king laughed and made a great joke of it” (Li reis s’en rist si s’en gabat).105 Keen to keep things upbeat, William apparently embraced the potentially divisive spectacle with a courteous gesture (curteisie le lur turnat), coercing as many as twenty of his own squires to cut their own hair in exactly the same style. Casting our net further, it seems that this kind of galvanizing political laughter can be found throughout a whole host of twelfth-century accounts of English kings. As early as the late eleventh century, William of Poitiers (d.1090) had imagined William the Conqueror joking adeptly in a similar way in his Gesta Guillelmi. Mocking the renowned strength of his powerful ally Fitz Osbern, Duke William reportedly carried both of their heavy hauberks on his back, a feat his entourage greeted with laughter.106 It was a joke that deftly illustrated the fact that, no matter how strong

102  C.  Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 170. 103  Paul Dalton, “Geffrei Gaimar’s ‘Estoire Des Engleis,” Peacemaking, and the ‘Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation,” Studies in Philology 104: 4 (2007): pp. 427–54. 104  On this technique of laughter as diplomacy in the 1100s, see Katrin Beyer, “Wit and Irony: Rhetorical Strategies and their Performance in Political and Learned Communities in England (1066–1259),” in Networks of Learning: Perspectives on Scholars in Byzantine East and Latin West, c.1000–1200, edited by S. Steckel, N. Gaul and M. Grünbart (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2014), pp. 147–59. 105 Gaimar, Estoire, pp. 330–1. 106 William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, edited and translated by R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), ii: 9, pp. 114–17.

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  81 Fitz Osbern was, William would always be the strongest. Moving forward to the 1140s, we also find King Stephen using a similar kind of clever wit to win friends and influence people. As we see in William of Malmesbury’s later work, the Historia Novella, Stephen was said to have joked to gain supporters among the multitude in the country, so successfully that he “easily won the affections” of people from all social ranks.107 An elaboration of this motif can be found later on in Wace’s Roman de Rou (c.1170), a vernacular history of England commissioned by King Henry II personally. Wace’s version of history typically figured laughter as a successful method for building political reputations and healing broken relations. After an emperor had criticized a duke for his sharp behavior, for instance, Wace explained how the duke responded with a measured joke. The emperor changed his mind immediately after laughing, telling his men now that they should do anything they could to help the duke out of respect for his “courtliness” (curteis).108 Throughout the Roman de Rou we also find laughter playing a key role in the myth-making of political character. Wace for instance took great effort to praise the wit of Gunnor, the wife of Duke Richard “the Fearless” of Normandy. When Richard made advances on their wedding night, he said, Gunnor joked that because they were now married she could now do as she pleased in their bed. As Wace tells us, this remark caused much laughing at court. It came to be recounted “for a good long time afterwards,” and was ultimately key in cementing Gunnor’s reputation as “a highly esteemed lady of good character.”109 So far, we have seen some examples of kings using laughter in political dealings. Yet laughter also often functioned as a symbol of political virtue or vice. On the one hand, it could be a sign of heroic triumph, as it had been for Rufus in his defeat of the rebel Robert of Mowbray. Crucially, this kind of laughter was usually detached from any obvious stimulus. What was important in these cases was not the cause or the meaning of any joke, but rather the superficial image of laughter as a sign. We can particularly find this trope appearing in works of romance. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the figure of Gawain can be found laughing in a number of situations where he decisively shows heroic superiority over his opponents.110 In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Gesta regum, for instance, King Arthur was shown laughing triumphantly at the moment he killed a giant ogre (rex illico in risum solutus), as a celebration of his heroic success.111 Equally, the character 107 William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, edited and translated by Edmund King and K. R. Potter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), ch. 14. 108 Wace, Roman de Rou, edited by A.  J.  Holden, vol. 1 (Paris, A.  & J.  Picard, 1970), p. 277. “Li emperiere asez s’en rist / e a ses genz en riant dist, / si cum il parlout en gregeis, / ke mult esteit li ducs curteis; / or[e] feist ceo ke il voldreit, / ja maod rien ne li veereit.” 109 Wace, Roman de Rou, vol. 1, pp. 183–5. “. . . gabé e ris . . . / Gunor fu dame mult preisie, / de bones murs, bien enseigneee.” 110  Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, edited by Pickens, for instance: p. 345, l.7036. 111  Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum, ch. 10, 3.

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82  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century of Willame in the Chansons de Geste cycle is shown laughing throughout the text, whether he is outwitting rivals, solving riddles, or vanquishing opponents in combat.112 Inverse to this tradition, laughter was also often used as a sign of wicked deceit. While also presented as detached from any obvious stimulus, this type of “forced laughter” was usually flagged as “hiding an evil intent.”113 Around the middle of the century, Henry of Huntingdon (d.c.1156) recalled how Thomas the Prince of Louvain had contrived to conceal his wicked deeds in precisely this way. While he would speak false words of peace, Henry warned, the prince simultaneously plunged his sword into the hearts of his closest friends, “not without a laugh” (non sine risu gladio transpungebat).114 This, too, was an idea that found currency in the literature circulated by Henry II’s courtiers. Perhaps the most vivid example was Nigel Wireker’s Passion of Saint Lawrence, which featured the maniacal King Decius laughing frequently to cover up his brutal anger while persecuting Lawrence and other Christians.115 Meanwhile in Laüstic, one of the Lais of Marie de France, the figure of the suspicious and violent lord used a false laugh to mask his plot for murderous revenge.116 Between these two extremes, many writers chose to make a more nuanced connection between laughter and political character. The historian Ernst Curtius once observed that it became popular in twelfth-century literature to praise spiritual figures for their “serious yet light” behavior.117 One of the most vivid examples of this idea in action occurs in the Ghentish Latin fabliau poem, Ysengrimus (c. early 1150s). Although a satirical work, the Ysengrimus may also be read as a sort of training manual for learning the political efficacy of laughter. From the beginning the poet explained the importance of humor as a way of tactfully hiding displeasure. Early on, we are shown how the wolf protagonist does not yet grasp this skill. When he harshly responds to the mockery and criticism he receives from others, we essentially witness the wolf ’s failure to be a good diplomat.118 112  Joan M. Ferrante, “Introduction,” in Guillame d’Orange: Four Twelfth-Century Epics, edited and translated by Joan  M.  Ferrante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 5. Examples of Willame laughing in the twelfth-century epic Loquifer Battle, found in Willame of Orange, A Translation of the Cycle of Willame of Orange, translated by Guérard Piffard (Ann Arbor, MI: San Diego State University Press, 1977), vol. 1: p. 566, l.2380; p. 574, lines c.2763–6. 113  Guibert of Nogent’s Monodiae, PL vol. 156, cols. 861C-D.  “Erubuit dicto ille, et ut erat non minimum versipellis, risu extortitio fucata nequitia abiit, audita relaturus ad suos.” 114  Henry of Huntingdon, “De Contemptu Mundi,” in Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, edited and translated by Diana Greenway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 584–619, C.10, pp. 600–3. Note, I have adapted Greenway’s translation. 115  Nigel of Canterbury, The Passion of St Lawrence, l.2043. 116  The Lais of Marie de France, translated by Keith Busby and Glyn S. Burgess (London: Penguin, 1999), Laustic, p. 95. For a similar anecdote, see also Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, IV: 15, p. 238. 117 Ernst  R.  Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 417. 118  Ysengrimus, edited by Jill Mann (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 3: 885, “Non hec dicta lupus laudi putat esse, iocue / Nec risu studium dissimulantis agit.”

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  83 When he stays at a monastery a little later in the story, however, a company of monks begin to teach him how to effectively take a joke. They laugh at him when he boasts of his genealogy, and mock him constantly for his “rustic naivety.”119 More gently, the monk Convigarus later makes a gentle but pointed joke (dulci voce iocatur ovans) as a way of showing the wolf that his time in the monastery should now come to an end.120 Throughout these different episodes, the Ysengrimus effectively tracks the hero’s cultivation of an ironic persona for achieving diplomatic ends. Eventually, the poet fully politicizes this advice in an earnest encomium for the real-life figure of Abbot Balduin of Liesborn (d.1161).121 Praising him for “mixing sternness and merriment with a skill of his own,” the urged his readers to follow the abbot’s example. By “brightening their faces” (exhilara frontem) and enjoying “jokes that avoid dishonor” (sine labe iocos), he said, they too would be able to strengthen their virtue and learn to live a good Christian life.122 To more fully grasp these dimensions of political laughter, it is important to remember how often twelfth-century leaders were described asserting their will through gesture alone.123 Often, a prince or prelate would publicly demonstrate their allegiances through ritualized actions. Ralph Diceto (d.c.1202), for instance, wrote of how Henry II received Thomas Becket with a kiss, but as he was displeased with his archbishop made a show of it by withholding “the fullness of grace,” immediately turning his face away from all who had assembled there to see him.124 Abbot Suger (d.1151), meanwhile, described in his biographical study of Louis VI how the French king’s smile could indicate his assent more efficiently than his words. Praising Louis’s help in implementing one of his own policies, Suger remarked how pleasurable it was for him and his company to see the king approaching, and that they all realized that the king gave his assent as “his face, once so severe,” was “now so serene.”125 There was no need in this sketch for Suger to record the king’s words, and Louis may not have said anything at all. For the abbot, the king’s face 119  Ysengrimus, 5: 703, “Contio tota iterum risit, fratremque locutum / Omnia siluestri simplicitate ferunt.” 120  Ysengrimus, 5: 1294. 121  Jill Mann has opposed the view that this passage is sarcastic. She observes, through documentary study, that Abbot Balduin was indeed renowned for generosity, and notes that the praise is neither put into the mouth of the one of the animals, nor undercut by any juxtaposed narrative action. More significantly, the praise for Balduin stands as a stark contrast to the rapacious image of the wolf-monk. Ysengrimus, pp. 147–56. 122  Ysengrimus, ll.497–522. 123  On this subject, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 124  Ralph Diceto, Radulphi de Diceto decani Lundoniensis opera historica, edited by William Stubbs (London, Rolls Series, 1876), p. 308. 125  Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis, Vie de Louis VI Le Gros, edited and translated by Henri Waquet (Paris: Société d’Édition Les Belles Lettres, 1964), pp. 210–12. English translation: Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis, The Deeds of Louis the Fat, edited and translated by Richard Cuismano and John Moorhead (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), p. 124.

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84  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century alone conveyed his political blessing. Appreciating these variations on the risus regalis, it is evident that by the later twelfth century laughter was beginning to be shown as having the power to enact a similarly immediate politics of presence. As exemplified in Gaimar’s account of Rufus’s dealing with Earl Hugh, laughter could often articulate a negotiation of political relationships that was both more delicate and expansive than anything that could be rendered in explicit speech alone. * * * How did these three figurations of laughter, the risus mysticus, the risus blasphemus, and the risus regalis, relate to one another? What fundamental qualities and ­capacities might have crystallized in the minds of twelfth-century poets when they chose to make a character laugh in these different ways? Perhaps what unites these three powers, first of all, is that they all suggest a strong connection between laughter and transformation in the twelfth-century textual imagination. It is striking that wherever it appeared in narrative works or poems, laughter very often marked a moment of pivotal change. Whether emerging at the point of a divine revelation, before a cosmic punishment, or in the midst of tense conferences with kings, laughter often triggered some kind of transition, usually with a strong moral implication attached. Not only did it typically alter the course of the narrative or plot, but it frequently cast particular characters in a radically new light, suggesting that, as either a byproduct or a consequence of their laughter, their fate was about to be radically altered. In this sense, laughter took on an awesome potential. It is important to recognize that this characteristic emerged only gradually, however. Broadly speaking, we can see that images of spiritual laughter expanded from the 1130s and 40s onwards, alongside new images of laughter as a mode of politically effective governance. While the cachinnum had long carried diabolical associations in medieval texts, we can see that an increasing number of writers turned to focus on this capacity once more as the century developed. Above all, we can observe the contours of these shifts exemplified in the works of William of Malmesbury, whose emphasis on saintly laughter, the diabolical cachinnum, and, after revision, on the effective jocularity of William Rufus proved influential on many of the English Latin writers that followed. But beyond William’s work, we have seen how laughter’s role in narrative and poetry pluralized considerably over the longer course of the twelfth century, a change that corresponded with the general Christianization and politicization of laughter that we identified in the previous chapter. We have already seen how laughter became a positive object of study in twelfthcentury rhetorical and philosophical discourses, and how it simultaneously acquired a set of new moral associations in intellectual and theological debates. Without doubt, the emerging poetic motifs we have seen here worked in tandem with these wider intellectual trends. But the question remains: Can we identify

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Powerful Laughter in Twelfth-Century Narrative  85 any unique potential causes for the power attributed to laughter in twelfth-century narrative? Perhaps the most obvious explanation lies in the impact of classical texts. As many medievalists have pointed out, the classical models of the likes of Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, and Macrobius cast a long shadow over the writers of the 1100s. It is no coincidence, for instance, that we begin to see more intimate portraits of laughing kings in precisely the same period that Suetonius, the writer of the Twelve Caesars, was becoming a popular touchstone for historians and chroniclers. But it is important to stress that these antique templates competed with a great range of other literary models available to twelfth-century authors. While Suetonius’s works may partially explain the advent of the diplomatic laughter of the risus regalis, it is difficult to see how they could account for the spread of images of laughing prophets such as Edward the Confessor, or for the obsessive connections between laughter and divine punishment exemplified in the stories of William of Malmesbury or Guibert of Nogent. Instead, I would like to suggest that to understand the political laughter of the risus regalis we must read it in light of the more explicitly supernatural power underlying both the risus mysticus and the risus blasphemus. As we unravel these different motifs, we come to grasp a single thread, one that connected laughter with a type of higher judgment, or else with a suspension of ordinary modes of action while making way for a powerful intervention. When Gaimar’s King William was shown settling disputes with laughter, he was effectively overruling the usual practices of law and custom with a charismatic exception. Although this was not a divine intervention in the same way as the laughing Edward the Confessor’s prophecy, it was certainly framed as both exceptional and awe-inspiring. Coming at the precise moment when an expected course of affairs was interrupted, King William’s political laughter appeared as a challenge to human pride and procedure that made sense in the context of the rapturous hilarity of Chrétien de Troyes’s prophets or the cackling of demons in visions of Hell and Purgatory. Even when it was communicated as a shrewd tactic of diplomacy, laughter still carried overtones of divine power in twelfth-century texts. As we will see, this considerable power would find an explosive social and political outlet in the intensely pressurized environment of Henry II’s court.

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3

Laughter and Power at Henry II’s Court A wise man dispenses doctrines according to order, rule, and measure. For jokers, however, rule, measure, and order perish.1 John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, 1: 25 By all accounts, Henry II’s court was a theater of biting laughter, satirical play, and spiteful ridicule. When Thomas Becket entered the service of King Henry, friends advised that he would have to endure a lot of mockery. Beware the flatterers around the king, said the Bishop of Coventry Hugh of Nonant (d.1198), as behind their laughing exterior they would secretly be mocking him (Hii sunt palam rident, intus derident).2 Arnulf of Lisieux warned that his new colleagues would take any opportunity to destroy his reputation by ridicule.3 “Defer to the king” at all times, Arnulf urged, otherwise rivals would seize the chance to “deride and mock” (deridere et insultare) them both.4 On a far grander scale, John of Salisbury dedicated a long treatise of advice, the Policraticus, to Thomas personally. Breaking his longer political discourse, John addressed Thomas directly in an urgent passage. He should strive to be a model courtier, he told him, by ignoring curial ridicule and remaining thoughtfully detached in the face of rivals’ jokes (philosopharis in nugis alienis).5 Becket was not the last prominent figure to be on the receiving end of this kind of advice. Similar anxieties dogged courtiers so long as Henry was on the throne. In 1189, the satirist Nigel Wireker advised his friend William Longchamp, Becket’s latest successor as royal chancellor, that he would suffer derision at the royal court to such an extent that he would have to “make all of [his] interior open” for everyone to see (omnia fac pateant interiora tui).6 Humor and laughter had their own codes and ethics within this court ­environment. So far in this book we have suggested a heightened intellectual 1 John of Salisbury, Entheticus Maior and Minor, edited and translated by Jan van Laarhoven (Leiden: Brill, 1987), vol. 1, 1: 25, l.331–2, pp. 126–7. “Ordine, lege, modo dispensat dogmata prudens: contra nugifluis lex, modus, ordo perit.” 2  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 52, pp. 218–19. 3  Arnulf of Lisieux, The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, edited by Frank Barlow (London: Camden Society, Third Series, 1939), Letter 10, pp. 13–14. Translation from Carolyn Poling Schriber, The Letter Collections of Arnulf of Lisieux (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 3:02, pp. 190–1. 4  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 26, pp. 82–3. 5 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, sive de nugis curialium et vestigis philosophorum, edited by Clement C. J. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), vol. 1, 2: Prologue, p. 65. 6  Nigellus de Longchamp [Nigel Wireker], Tractatus contra curiales et officiales clericos, edited by A. Boutemy (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 148.

Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century. Peter Jones, Oxford University Press (2019). © Peter J. A. Jones. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  87 and  literary power of laughter in twelfth-century England. While theological, philosophical, and medical debates began conceptualizing laughter as a positive bodily power by the later 1100s, authors of chronicles, histories, and hagiographies simultaneously began taking laughter to represent diabolical, miraculous, or politically awe-inspiring transformations in narrative. But how did these literary and philosophical ideals relate to the concrete social and political world of twelfth-century England? By focusing on the cultivation of practices of humor in the circle surrounding Henry II, this chapter will provide a crucial third component in our quest to understand the making of the “laughing king” and the “laughing saint.” As I will show, this was an arena in which humor became a particular mode of politics, one able to incite awe and fear in equal measure. This chapter is explicitly concerned with social action rather than with textual constructions. Of course, it is true that our access to Henry’s court can only come through written representations, most of which were highly artful. But this does not mean that we cannot access a vivid social reality beyond the texts. On the contrary, reading between the lines it is obvious that Henry’s courtiers valued humor very highly. We get fond impressions of a constant flow of jokes in the sketches of John of Salisbury, in the letters of Peter of Blois, and in the recollections of Gerald of Wales. Reflecting on his time touring with the king in the 1170s, the troubadour poet Bernart of Ventadorn (d.c.1200) described a life full of “play and joy and amusement,” of “singing and laughing.”7 Among the king’s circle, good jokes were widely celebrated and became the stuff of treasured memory. John of Salisbury could not resist throwing two joke names—“Serenus” and “Tranquillus”—into a list of influential classical authors, and Peter of Blois appreciated the joke enough to repeat it.8 Gerald of Wales felt that Walter Map’s jokes were so important that he reproduced them in his own work, and took pleasure in explaining them at length.9 People who did not laugh, meanwhile, were marked out as oddities. A certain Arnold, a correspondent of Arnulf of Lisieux (d.1184), earned the nickname “Qui-non-Ridet” (“He who doesn’t laugh”), presumably for his stony face.10 And not joking or laughing at all was considered,

7  Bernart de Ventadorn, A Bilingual Edition of the Love Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn, edited and translated by Ronnie Apter, with additional translations by Mark Herman (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), P-C 70, 35, pp. 216–17. 8  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 2, p. 364. Peter of Blois copied John’s list but omitted these two names, writing to his uncle detailing the classical authors he had read at school. Peter of Blois, Epistolae, PL vol. 207, Ep. 101, col. 313. See John D. Cotts, The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture in the Twelfth Century (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), p. 114. For a view of how Peter of Blois engaged with John of Salisbury’s work, see Frédérique Lachaud, “Filiation and Context: The Medieval Afterlife of the Policraticus,” in A Companion to John of Salisbury, edited by Christophe Grellard and Frédérique Lachaud (Leiden: Brill, 2015): pp. 377–438, pp. 381–7. 9  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, Speculum Ecclesiae, 3:14, pp. 220–1. 10  Arnulf of Lisieux, The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Letter 32, pp. 52–3. See also John of Salisbury, The Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury, edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 17.

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88  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century at least by Walter Map, as a sign that a person was either extremely arrogant or else suffering from some kind of disease.11 In this respect Henry’s court was truly exceptional. It is true that Henry’s royal contemporaries, King Louis VII of France (d.1180) and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa (d.1189), both placed a definite importance on humor and wit.12 But the writers surrounding Henry surpassed their French and German counterparts in both their scrutiny and celebration of humor. First of all, this was the epicenter of the most illustrious satire boom since Roman antiquity. Producing works such as De nugis curialium, the Speculum stultorum, the Entheticus, and the Speculum Ecclesiae, the writers around King Henry ridiculed the trappings of power in a sustained genre, through which they developed sophisticated satirical theories of their own. Second, this was a political environment where good humor was explicitly encouraged, not only through learned customs and guidebooks but also through the king’s own peculiar incentives. Daniel of Beccles (d.c.1206), who compiled a conduct manual dedicated to instructing courtiers in wit (facetus), explained that he had learnt everything he knew from “old King Henry” himself.13 Meanwhile, the careers of Bishops Roger of Worcester (d.1179) and Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200) exemplified how courtiers brave enough to share a good joke with the king could win rewards. On occasions when Roger and Hugh had each fallen out of Henry’s favor, both men were able to resurrect their political careers simply by making the king laugh. Generally speaking, humor served three principal roles in the political and social operation of the court: 1) It served as a sign of cultivation and understanding; 2) It worked as a weapon in political conflict; and finally, 3) It operated as a means for saying the unsayable, or for revealing otherwise inaccessible ideas. Although the nature and development of these different roles will become clear throughout the course of this chapter, it is worth fleshing them out a little further at the outset. We can say that humor acted as a sign of cultivation, first of all, insofar as it allowed courtiers to further define, police, and maintain their social identity. Manners were scrupulously observed at Henry’s court, to the extent that, as Martin Aurell has suggested, comportment even became an aspect of political discourse.14 Joking and laughing became, in turn, key markers of the courtly art. Through a series of conduct manuals and advisory letters, courtiers learned how to joke effectively as a way of smoothing their political negotiations. Equally, 11 Walter Map, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, edited and translated by M.  R.  James, Christopher  N.  L.  Brooke, and R.  A.  B.  Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 4:2, pp. 286–7. 12  Aldo Scaglione, Knights at Court: Courtliness, Chivalry, and Courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 174. 13  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus Magnus Daniel Becclesiensis, edited by J.  Gilbart Smyly (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1939), p. 92, l.2836–9. 14  Martin Aurell, L’empire des Plantagênets; See also Egbert Türk, Nugae curialium: Le règne d’Henri II Plantagenêt (1145–1189) et l’ethique politique (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1977).

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  89 courtiers also mobilized a distinct sense of humor as a way of policing the mores and ideals of the courtier class. By repeating jokes that reinforced their circle as literate, anti-clerical, and decidedly masculine, these men used humor not only as a flag of curial belonging, but also as a shared language, a way of showing that they understood the complex and largely unspoken etiquette required of the royal entourage. Even more practical was laughter’s use as an effective political weapon.15 Courtiers were well aware of the dangers of public ridicule, as we can see from the advice given to both Thomas Becket and William Longchamp. Within this social and political circle, laughter functioned not only as a way of humiliating rivals, but also as a method for putting newcomers in their place. As Hugh Thomas has shown, anxieties about shame and humiliation provoked constant vigilance in the group surrounding the king.16 According to Peter of Blois, Henry’s court was feared as a “theater of derision” (derisionis theatrum), an arena where ridicule was understood as being able to make or break the trajectory of a career.17 But humor could be a weapon of defense just as much as attack. Between throwing shameful jokes at opponents, the likes of John of Salisbury and Walter Map advised their colleagues that they should eventually seek to overcome mocking criticism by learning first to laugh at themselves. At the other end of the spectrum was humor’s role as a tool of revelation. In the context of high tensions and anxiety about status and manners, humor often became an oblique way of expressing things that were unpalatable, inaccessible, or otherwise unsayable. When fellow courtiers joked for instance that Gerald of Wales would never become Bishop of St David’s, they were able to reveal his implicit standing with the king without having to go into the politically convoluted specifics.18 As Stephen Jaeger has pointed out, irony in this kind of context allowed courtiers to speak freely while avoiding the risk of provoking upset or anger.19 Beyond this technique, however, jokes were also useful way of outlining ideas that were more or less impossible to define explicitly. Walter Map exemplified this kind of approach in his perspective on satire. Glossing one of his anecdotes, Walter alluded to the revelatory potential of witty stories. A discerning audience 15  For a general comment on the use of laughter as a weapon in medieval political discourse, see Jacques Le Goff ’s conclusions in Le forme della propaganda politica nel due e nel trecento, edited by Paolo Cammarosano (Rome: College de l’École Francais de Rome, 1994), pp. 519–28. 16  Hugh Thomas, “Shame, Masculinity, and the Death of Thomas Becket,” Speculum 87: 4 (October 2012): pp. 1050–88. 17  Peter of Blois’s letter to Pope Innocent III: “Fruges abstulit, domos combussit. Supplicavi ut michi damna hec repararet. Ipse afflicti et magnatum preces subsannans insultabat gravius michi, damnumque et confusionem meam in publice derisionis theatrum proplavit. In omnibus his non est aversus furor eius, sed adhuc manus eius extenta.” Peter of Blois, The Later Letters of Peter of Blois, edited by Elizabeth Revell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), letter 7, p. 43. Peter also uses the phrase in Letter 8, p. 49. Note, these citations are taken from Hugh Thomas, “Shame, Masculinity,” p. 1057. 18  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De rebus, ii.9, p. 60. 19  C.  Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 170.

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90  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century at court, he said, would be able to find “bitter paths to justice” (amaras iusticie vias) through careful reading and reflection on the “frivolous things” (ex frivolis his) he had written.20 Each of these different humorous codes is crucial for appreciating the conditions that created the laughing figures of King Henry and Saint Thomas. Over the course of this chapter we will see, for example, how court laughter acquired associations with notions of powerful charisma, political supremacy, and coded revelation. Yet beyond the immediate question of laughter’s place in twelfth-century England, a focus on political humor also captures something of the unique atmosphere of the English royal court. On the one hand it gives us an insight into the tenuous hold that many had on their political careers.21 When Arnulf of Lisieux or John of Salisbury wrote about their acute fears of ridicule, we get a very vivid sense of how precarious their positions were, and how contingent their power was on the general esteem of the court.22 Henry’s functionaries were largely upwardly mobile social movers. If they were not necessarily “men raised from the dust,” then they were at least a non-aristocratic class, carving out their own path through royal service, usually via university education and clerical work experience in major households.23 Unlike previous generations of royal courtiers, their position was never secured by ownership of land, feats in arms, or nobility of blood. The very fact that court careers could be ruined by ridicule contributes to arguments recent historians have made about how fragile and negotiable power had become in royal service by this point in time.24 Equally, when we read the likes of Peter of Blois and Walter Map discussing how satire could reveal hidden truths, we get an impression of just how stifled expression could be under Henry’s regime.25 That jokes were so often used to attack rivals, undermine oppressive hierarchies, or speak truth to power arguably reflects some very profound frustrations with what has been called the “artificial” veneer of courtliness itself.26 It is within this social context, ultimately, that we can make sense of laughter’s peculiar power in twelfth-century England. Whether as a political weapon, as a method of subtle communication, or as a tool for policing court identity, humor’s unique promise was that it allowed courtiers to say the otherwise unsayable. 20  De nugis, 3:2, pp. 244–7. 21  On this issue, see Hugh Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England, 1066–1216 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 117–53. 22  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, I: 25, pp. 128–9. 23 Ralph V. Turner, Men Raised from the Dust, p. 3. Note that Turner initially uses the phrase to refer to functionaries at the court of Henry II’s grandfather, Henry I. 24  David Crouch, “Loyalty, Career and Self-Justification at the Plantagenet Court: The ThoughtWorld of William Marshal and his Colleagues,” in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224), edited by Martin Aurell (Poitiers: Civilisation Médiévale, 2003), pp. 229–40; Hugh Thomas, The Secular Clergy, pp. 114–16. 25  Peter of Blois, “Ridere solitus,” in Petri Blesensis Carmina, edited by C. Wollin (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 295–304. See also E. Braunholz, “Die Streitgedichte Peters von Blois und Roberts von Beaufeu über den Wert des Weines und des Bieres,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 47 (1927): pp. 30–8. 26  Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, p. 334.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  91

Cultivating a Sense of Humor Developing a sense of humor was essential for those surrounding the king, and there were some fairly rigid guidelines on how to do it. Although John of Salisbury worried in his Entheticus that joking would cause “rule, order, and measure to perish,” it turns out that joking at court was a highly ordered affair. In particular, the virtue of facetia, or wit, was described as a priceless form of political and social capital.27 As well as demonstrating a courtier’s accomplished refinement, well-timed jokes could quickly show that somebody fully understood the implicit codes of royal service. Learning to joke with full discretion, courtiers above all laughed to make it clear that they belonged in the tenuous court environment, while distinguishing themselves from those who were judged to not quite fit into the curial circle. Far from being entirely spontaneous, much of this controlled humor was learned directly through books of manners and established customs and was ultimately shared through a pool of particularly ideological jokes. Perhaps the most explicit way that courtiers learned to laugh and joke was through conduct literature. Codes of social and bodily manners became increasingly vital to the political functioning of royal courts in the 1100s. More often than not, this politesse was a superficial attribute. As Walter Map observed, “customary courtesy” (assuescenda facetia) had to be paid to courtly superiors “even when it [was] not due.”28 Although traditionally learned by imitation, by the later twelfth century court habits were beginning to be transmitted through written guidebooks. Two popular examples of these guides were produced by writers close to the king in the years around 1180, Daniel of Beccles’s Urbanus Magnus,29 and the Livre des manières by Étienne de Fougère (d.1178).30 Extensive advice on manners also appeared in Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, parts of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, and in Robert of Cricklade’s De connubia patriarchae Iacob. For all of these writers, the father of the genre was arguably Cato, a fourthcentury writer thought in the Middle Ages to be Cato the Elder.31 According to 27 Matthew Strickland, Henry the Young King, 1155–1183 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 64–5. 28  Walter Map, De nugis, 2:17, pp. 172–3. On this subject more generally, see C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness. 29  On Daniel, see Fiona Whelan, The Making of Manners and Morals in Twelfth-Century England: The Book of the Civilised Man (London: Routledge, 2017). A briefer overview is given in Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings: 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 582–8. For mention of Daniel as a member of Henry’s court, see John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae . . . catalogus (2 pts.; Basel, 1557–9), pt.1, p. 221 (cited in Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, p. 583). 30  On Étienne and his work, see Keith V. Sinclair, “L’inspiration liturgique du Livre des manières d’Étienne de Fougères,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 40 (1997): pp. 261–6. 31  John Gillingham, “From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): pp. 267–89. On Cato, see J. W. Duff and A. M. Duff, Minor Latin Poets, Loeb Classical Library, 284 (London: Heinemann, 1934), pp. 585–642.

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92  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Cato, who taught stoic moderation in all things, all but the most restrained forms of laughter were to be avoided, and mockery was forbidden unless a person ­particularly deserved it.32 While largely echoing this advice, the books of manners at Henry’s court added the suggestion that laughter could be refined so long as it was artfully controlled.33 One place to begin is with Daniel of Beccles’s conduct manual, the Urbanus Magnus (Or “Civilized Gentleman”). This long guide to the ideal traits of a refined courtier, written in a lively Latin rhyme, may have originally been a compilation of different standalone poems. Nevertheless, the book was certainly produced under the influence of the social world of Henry’s court. Not only was it dedicated to Henry personally, but it also vividly reflected the tense political world of Angevin politics, and seemingly responded to the court’s culture of complaint and satire.34 Like many other conduct manuals, Daniel cautioned his readers against overstepping the bounds of modesty. Above all, he urged that their laughter should always be moderate and controlled, regardless of its precise reason or cause. When a gentleman was amused, Daniel said, he should not bellow out loudly or with a rictus jaw. Instead, his laughter should be “held in the mouth” (tenuis sit risus in ore), with his lips firmly covering his teeth. As the body reveals the mind, he said, so a wise man laughs modestly, while a “man with an empty brain bursts out in a cackle” (est hominis vacui cerebri crispare cachinnos).35 Accordingly, Daniel advised that jokes should be tailored to avoid producing sudden blasts or cries.36 As with much of Daniel’s advice, the most important thing was maintaining a stable equilibrium and avoiding extremes at all costs. Many writers at Henry’s court, like Daniel, seem to have been haunted by the prospect of losing their bodily self-control in laughter. John of Salisbury’s Policraticus specifically warned of the raucousness and “lasciviousness” that he saw as inevitably coming when a person dropped their guard, letting themselves be carried away by “vulgar” laughing.37 Much of this anxiety was wrapped up with what laughing did to the body itself. Robert of Cricklade, the prior of St Frideswide’s in Oxford who later dedicated a text to Henry II personally, encapsulated this fear  in his guidance for new converts. When people laughed they “deformed” 32 The pithy guidance of his Monostichs advised that laughter should be rare and dignified: “Neminem riseris,” it said, and “Miserum noli ridere.” Cato, Monostichs, 21 and 42. In his Distichs, meanwhile, Cato added flesh to these thoughts, reminding readers to “keep their tongue” (compescere linguam), and to avoid carping at others in case they become derided in turn. Cato, Distichia, Book 1: 3, and 3: 7 “Alterius dictum aut factum ne carpseris unquam, exemplo simili ne te derideat alter.” 33  On conduct manuals in this period more generally, see Martin Aurell, Le chevalier lettré: Savoir et conduite de l’aristovratie aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 2011), pp. 328–32. 34  Whelan discusses the authorship and construction of the poem in The Making of Manners, pp. 1–24. She discusses the relationship to Henry II and his court at pp. 182–203. 35  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, pp. 31–2, l.875–90. 36  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 39, l.1098–99. 37  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 1:8, Webb, vol. 1, p. 48. On John of Salisbury’s criticism of court  entertainments, see David Luscombe, “John of Salisbury and Courtiers’ Trifles,” in Rulership and Rebellion in the Anglo-Norman World, c.1066–c.1216, edited by Paul Dalton and David Luscombe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 141–61.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  93 themselves (deformiter in chachinno), Robert warned, suggesting that this deformity was something that would ultimately corrupt the soul.38 With a much more direct and social concern, Andreas Capellanus warned lovers that women would think them foolish unless they kept their laughter restrained.39 Whether for moral or for romantic purposes, refining the volume and look of laughter was essential for curating perceptions of the individual. Good laughter was central to the good courtly body. For all of this caution, however, it is interesting to observe that no conduct manual ever suggested avoiding laughter altogether. Instead, courtiers were encouraged to cultivate the right kind of laughter. For example, good humor while dining with guests was considered a mark of particular distinction. John of Salisbury’s idea of a successful banquet was one where laughter fired back and forth, with “gracious and charming jokes” (iocus enim comis et venustas) filling the air.40 The Quisquis in mensa, a short poem from the 1170s dedicated to the teaching of good table manners, advised that the proper way to approach the other diners was with “a smiling face” (vultu sis hilaris).41 Meanwhile, for Daniel of Beccles, moderate witticisms were a hallmark of distinguished hosting, as well as a useful way of deflecting attention when awkward topics came up at the table.42 Mannered humor had a stronger practical application in the diplomatic sphere. Arnulf of Lisieux advised a friend that a “pleasing clemency” was often more useful than “rhetorical strictness” in bringing peace between two parties.43 More cautiously, John of Salisbury warned in his Entheticus that the king’s visitors should always be “supplied with an agreeable joke.”44 According to Daniel of Beccles’s conduct manual, visitors from abroad (alienas gentes) should customarily be charmed by the witty conversation (sermone faceto) of their host.45 This was an aspect that Gerald of Wales highlighted in his praise of the great Welsh families, who he said joked with one another even when they were at points of disagreement.46 As well as building allegiance or rapport, it appears that this kind of joking was a useful way of disarming potential enemies and bringing thorny issues onto mutually agreeable grounds. 38  London, BL Royal MS 8 E II, f.96r. 39  Andreas Capellanus, De amore, edited by P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), 1, pp. 82–3. 40 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 8:10, Webb, vol. 2, p. 291. Here John is borrowing from the Saturnalia of Macrobius, 2:8, 73–4. 41  Quisquis es in mensa, in Studies in Medieval Culture, edited by Charles Homer Haskins (New York, 1965), p. 79. Haskins copied the poem from: Francesco Novati, Carmina Medii Aevi (Florence: Libreria Dante, 1883), pp. 49–50. 42  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 33, l.919–23; p. 31, l.857–65. 43  The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Letter 55, p. 101. Translated in Schriber, 2.08, p. 133. For a sketch of Arnulf ’s life and his relationship with other members of Henry’s court, see Ewald Könsgen, “Introduction,” in Die Gedichte Arnulfs von Lisieux, edited and translated into German by Ewald Könsgen, 1–8 (Heidelberg: C Winter, 2002), pp. 1–8; and Egbert Türk, Arnoul de Lisieux: Souvenirs d’un évêque de cour malchanceux (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017). 44  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, III: 103, pp. 208–9. 45  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus Magnus, pp. 46–7, l.1340–1, and 1346–7. 46  Gerald of Wales, Opera 6, Descriptio Kambriae, 2:14, pp. 190–1. Gerald describes their “verborum facetia et urbanitate,” for instance.

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94  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century All of the guidebooks made it clear that well-cultivated laughter should only be  reserved for worthy targets. If trying to impress a potential lover, Andreas Cappellanus warned that it was extremely unattractive to be caught laughing at the poor.47 And for potential preachers, Étienne de Fougères scorned those who tried to win cheap laughs with stupid or grotesque material.48 It was far more edifying, most commentators agreed, to try and turn the laughter on oneself instead. By the assessment of John of Salisbury, Augustus Caesar’s self-deprecating humor and ability to accept jokes made against him was one of the great strengths of his leadership.49 Practicing this art as much as preaching it, John often joked about himself in his letters, drawing attention to his own “stumbling speech,” “obtuse understanding,” and “parching tongue.”50 Gerald of Wales, meanwhile, advised his nephew (with perhaps a hint of disingenuousness) that it was always best to “mock and be sarcastic about no one more than yourself ” (vos ipsum deridere et delarvare).51 Most importantly, well-mannered joking was considered essential for cultivating a facetus character. Much remains to be written on the nature of this term facetus. In twelfth-century texts its meaning appears closest to our current sense of “wit” in modern English, signifying both an alert attention and a polite and sophisticated humor.52 As Katrin Beyer has suggested, the term carried universally positive connotations in the 1100s. It was associated with a distinctively French noblesse, with newly fashionable aristocratic ideals of chivalry, and with acute levels of intellectual refinement.53 At Henry’s court, it often carried the meaning of speedy intelligence and savoir-faire. Occasionally the term implied knowing when not to laugh, such as when Walter Map described King Henry as being too “facetus” to laugh at the naked buttocks of a Cistercian monk.54 For others, such as Gerald of Wales, facetia meant eloquence or erudition.55 Daniel of Beccles’s conduct manual gave an entire web of meanings, meanwhile. He claimed it was facetus to 47  Andreas Capellanus, De amore, 1, p. 83. 48  Étienne de Fougères, Le livre des manières, edited by Jacques  T.  E.  Thomas (Paris: Peeters, 2013), p. 42. 49  Cited in Janet M. Martin, “Cicero’s Jokes at the Court of Henry II of England: Roman Humor and The Princely Ideal,” Modern Language Quarterly 51: 2 (1990): pp. 144–66, p. 163. 50  C. Stephen Jaeger, “Irony and Role-Playing in John of Salisbury and the Becket Circle,” in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224): Actes du Colloque tenu à Poitiers du 2 au 5 mai 2002, edited by Martin Aurell (Poitiers: Civilisation Médiévale, 2003), pp. 319–31: p. 321. 51 Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, or A Mirror of Two Men, edited by Yves Lefèvre and R. B. C. Huygens, translated by Brian Dawson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974), pp. 32–3. 52 See the discussion of facetia in twelfth-century courts in C.  Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 161–8. 53 Katrin Beyer, “Wit and Irony: Rhetorical Strategies and their Performance in Political and Learned Communities in England (1066–1259),” in Networks of Learning: Perspectives on Scholars in Byzantine East and Latin West, c.1000–1200, edited by S. Steckel, N. Gaul and M. Grünbart (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2014), pp. 147–59. 54  Walter Map, De nugis, 1:25, pp. 102–3. 55  See how the word is paired in Gerald of Wales’s works. For instance, he describes Geoffrey, Count of Brittany, as “facendus et facetus.” Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler (De Principis Instructione), edited and translated by Robert Bartlett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018), 3:27, p. 690.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  95 offer food and drink to guests at the right time,56 it was facetus to use a measured quantity of words in one’s conversation (dilige temperiem, si diligis esse facetus),57 and it was even facetus to use a knife with careful precision (facete).58 Uniting all these different senses was the principal of balance. If being courtly meant maintaining a “stable tongue,” avoiding conflicts,59 restraining one’s emotions,60 and never wandering into foolish extremes,61 then being facetus was ultimately a measure of perspective and restraint. Laughing too much made a courtier appear crude, and for this they risked social exclusion.62 But not laughing at all, as John of Salisbury suggested in his Policraticus, lacked honesty and gave the impression that a courtier did not appreciate the demands of curial social life.63 Walking the line between these two poles, the facetus courtier demonstrated that he understood the social balancing act required of one in Henry II’s service. But what exactly did the facetus courtier find amusing enough to laugh and joke about? Here, as ever, we are foxed by restrictions in how courtiers presented their humor. Typically, writers only admitted to enjoying the most edifying material. Nevertheless, with a little reconstruction it is possible to identify a distinct “sense of humor” within the wider circle around Henry II. Court writers often shared particular kinds of jokes together, or else celebrated specific types of wit. When taken together, all of these recollections suggest a certain pattern. Cultivating an implicit image of the ideal courtier as a clerical, chaste, literate man, the jokes these men shared usually preyed on bad clerics, fellow courtiers with a poor grasp of Latin, or, most bitterly of all, women. Through sharing these jokes, much of the humor at Henry’s court essentially worked as another way of defining and policing the image of the successful courtier. Court writers were very keen, first of all, to separate their humor from the supposedly coarse and base humor of women, children, and the illiterate. But despite these protests, very few accounts of these groups actually laughing have survived in the sources (at least, not below the rank of Empress).64 John of Salisbury may have written in his Entheticus that “both men and women alike” enjoyed playful behavior at court (in nugis sexus uterque), but he never stopped to give us any jokes from the female perspective.65 But while women’s laughter was barely ever Equally, Gerald elsewhere describes Bishop Bernard as “facetus et copiose literatus,” Opera 4, De iure et statu, 2:152. 56  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 36, l.1013. 57  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 33, l.919–23. 58  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 33, l.931. 59  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 5, l.94–7. 60  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 49, l.1410; and p. 76, l.2312. 61  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 3; and p. 33, l.919–23. 62  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 32, l.895–6. Here, Daniel recommends not laughing with people when you feel it beneath you. 63  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 1:8, Webb vol. 1, p. 48: “Iocundum quidem est et ab honesto non recedit virum probum quandoque modesta hilaritate mulceri.” 64  For an example of Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda, laughing and sharing a joke, see Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 94, p. 387. 65  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Minor, 9, pp. 238–9.

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96  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century recorded, this did not prevent courtiers from choosing to gender excessive frivolity as “female.” John of Salisbury claimed that women were notorious for their levity (levitatem).66 Similarly, Daniel of Beccles made the extraordinary claim that “nothing in the world is so light as the minds of women” (In mundo nichil est levius quam mens muliebris).67 Etienne of Fougères described his archetypal figure of the “riche dame” as especially reckless in her frivolity. She would consider herself happy if people were killed through her debauchery, and then would not care if we (the onlookers) cried or laughed (ne li chaut qui qu’en plort ne rie).68 Childish humor was another negative benchmark for these court writers. Typically, the young were blamed for directing their jokes against the most undeserving of targets. Serlo of Wilton, the writer of proverbs, reminded his readers that while “youths are full of jokes,” they are not so wise as the old, who are “full of deliberation.”69 Gerald of Wales railed against his nephew’s “childish tongue” (linguam puerilem), with which, he said, the boy mocked and derided respectable men such as, worst of all, Gerald himself.70 Distancing himself from this low humor, Gerald denounced the youth (iuvenes) for especially taking glee at dirty jokes.71 In a more theological mode, Robert of Cricklade reminded the readers of his De connubio patriarchae Iacob how young people were to be punished for their mockery of the saints.72 Perhaps these courtiers protested too much. Records of Henry’s reign in fact reveal a steady expenditure on court jesters, or histriones.73 Among them was a certain Roland, nicknamed “the Farter,” who held a serjeantry from the king. In return for his office, on Christmas Day every year he performed a leap, a whistle, and a fart for the entertainment of the court.74 Unsurprisingly, the educated group in Henry’s entourage never admitted to liking this sort of act. According to John of Salisbury, jesters were nothing less than the “enemies of the crucified Christ.”75 Their jokes were gratuitous, he argued, although he did at least concede 66 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Book 8: ch. 11, vol. 2, p. 301. “[I]n muliebrem levitatem ab ­auctoribus passim multa scribuntur.” 67  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 69, l.2068. 68  Étienne de Fougères, Le livre des manières, vv.249–50, p. 82. 69  Serlo of Wilton, Serlon de Wilton Poemes latins, edited by Jan Öberg (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1965), pp. 91–2. 70  Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, pp. 32–3. 71  Gerald of Wales, Opera 3, De iure et statu, 7, p. 338. 72  London, BL Royal MS 8 E II, f.17r. Robert was perhaps alluding to the Book of Kings, which described how forty-two children were torn to pieces by two bears as punishment for mocking Elisha’s baldness. 2 Kings 2:23–5. 73 Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 320–1. On court jesters in this period, see John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998). 74  Rotuli de dominabus et pueris et puellis de donatione Regis, edited by J. H. Round (PRS 35; 1913), p. 62. See Martin Aurell, L’Empire Plantagenêt, p. 147, and p. 327 n.240; For a full discussion of Roland, see Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. 161–77. 75  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, 196, p. 279: “. . . hostes Crucifixi, histriones et mimos.” Compare John of Salisbury’s condemnation of the laughter of jesters with the teaching of one of his teachers in

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  97 that they could help put a stop to boredom.76 Peter of Blois went even further, writing a scathing letter denouncing English curial culture in which he particularly complained how “all kinds of jokers” (balatrones, hoc genus omne) followed the court around, to the point that they obstructed anybody else getting near the king.77 Whatever John of Salisbury thought, the humor of these jesters should not always be written off as empty amusement.78 As Martin Aurell has argued, these entertainers were also employed at court to advise the king on good policy. Occasionally they even spread propaganda, or “the Angevin message,” through their songs and jokes.79 For instance John Spang, a jester known for his sarcastic tongue (vir jocosus . . . lingua dicaci), helped in the diplomatic reception of Rhys, the Welsh prince. “Oh Rhys,” he said, mocking Gerald of Wales’s preaching ability, “you should love your kinsman the archdeacon, as today he only sent a hundred or more of your men off to battle for Christ; yet, if he had spoken in Welsh, I don’t imagine you would have had a single man left out of all your kingdom.”80 Rhys laughed, and apparently (although Gerald admits it himself) the Prince felt all the more welcome at court. These writers were also keen to distinguish their humor from that of the lower orders. When Arnulf of Lisieux savagely attacked his rival Gerard of Angoulême, he singled out how he indulged in vulgar laughter (cachinno) at bizarre novelties, such as mythical tales of men becoming pregnant. “Oh, stupendous stubbornness of the mind,” he complained, castigating Gerard for ignoring the “solemn miracles of creation.”81 Reflecting later on what made his own humor special, Arnulf insisted that he laughed only at “honest things.”82 Gerald of Wales gave a more lucid discussion of this distinction between polite and vulgar humor in his Speculum Duorum. During a long invective against his nephew, Gerald condemned the boy’s empty jokes (frivola) for their mixture of falsity and exclusivity. Going further, he rebuked him for laughing at “enchantments” (larvas), for mocking people in secret (occultas risus), and for frivolously “acting the fool to intelligent men.”83 Instead, he said, the nephew should only repeat stories that were “polite and Paris, Thierry of Chartres: “Liberalem id est modestum, ne scilicet usque ad cachinnum commoveatur ipse ioculator,” Latin Rhetorical Commentaries, 3:13:23, p. 297. 76  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 1:8, Webb, vol. 1, pp. 46–9. 77  Peter of Blois, Epistolae, PL vol. 207, Letter 14, cols. 49A-B. 78  On the political roles of jesters in the period, see for instance Laura Kendrick, “Jongleur as Propagandist: The Ecclesiastical Politics of Marcabru’s Poetry,” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Thomas  N.  Bisson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 259–86. 79  Martin Aurell, L’Empire Plantagenêt, p. 176. 80  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De rebus, 2: 19, p. 77. By grossly exaggerating Gerald’s skills in Welsh, Spang’s humor came in illuminating how bad he really was in that language. 81  Arnulf of Lisieux, Invectiva in Girardium Engolismensem Episcopum, Lobelli de lite. Vol. 3, edited by J. Dietrich (Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1897), pp. 81–108; p. 90. 82 Arnulf of Lisieux, Tractatus de Schismate Orto Post Honorii II Papae Decessum, in Arnulfi Lexoviensis episcopi epistolae, edited by J. A. Giles (Oxford, 1844), ch. IV, pp. 59–60. 83  Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, pp. 132–3.

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98  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century witty” (curialibus atque facetis), anecdotes of the kind that Gerald said he enjoyed with his own household of intelligent men.84 What sort of humor made up these “polite and witty” stories? Surveying the jokes Gerald and his fellow courtiers shared in their own work, we can discern a number of recurring comic techniques and obsessions. When Walter Map compared the royal court to “Hell itself,” he touched on a popular trend for absurd incongruities. By introducing one frame of reference into another, this kind of joke was meant to expose how people and institutions had fallen far short of an ideal. Roger of Howden explained this comic logic explicitly after a joke he repeated about John the Scott and Charles the Bald. “What separates a Scot from a sot?” Charles asked while the two men were seated across the table from one another at dinner. John jokingly answered, “This table!” Roger felt it necessary to explain why this was funny. “The king had asked him with reference to the different notion of manners,” he said, “whereas John made answer with reference to the distance of space.”85 Although these outlandish comparisons may seem banal today, at Henry’s court they often worked as an explosive way of puncturing a courtier’s puffed up self-image. When Gilbert Foliot mocked Thomas Becket because he “fancied consecration wiped away debts as baptism does sin,” what made the joke especially powerful was its suggestion that, despite the archbishop’s projected image of piety, he was still more adept at handling money than at handling sin.86 Much of the humor at court was essentially conservative, invoking a reactionary consensus of how their social and intellectual world should be. This was an environment where, as Andreas Cappellanus illustrated in one of his dialogues, poorer men were often mocked for trying to seduce higher status women.87 Meanwhile Gerald of Wales’s preaching text, the Gemma ecclesiastica, used humor to instill a particularly conservative view of school learning. In one anecdote Gerald described a boy who, having returned from one of the new schools in Paris, attempted to instruct his father in the principles of university logic. Apparently, Gerald claimed, the boy had tried to prove to him that six eggs were really twelve. The father responded by cooking the “twelve eggs,” eating six for himself and leaving the boy with the “other six,” which meant that the boy had nothing to eat at all. As Gerald explained, “In this way the father wittily fooled his son, exposing the studies he had done in Paris as vain and frivolous” (sic filium tam facete delusum et vanis ac frivolis studuisse deprehensum Parisius).88 Similar humor appeared in parts of John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, a text that mocked the superficiality of university 84  Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, pp. 132–3. 85  Roger of Howden, Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houdene, edited by William Stubbs (London: Rolls Series, 1869), vol. 1, pp. 53–4. Roger took this description verbatim from William of Malmesbury, yet the fact he chose to copy it suggests he agreed with the principle of the humor. For a discussion of this anecdote, see Katrin Beyer, “Wit and Irony,” pp. 154–5. 86  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 149, pp. 690–1. 87  Andreas Capellanus, De amore, pp. 66–9. 88  Gerald of Wales, Opera 2, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2:37, p. 350.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  99 masters committed to the “new logic” of dialectic.89 At the heart of many of these court jokes were very real twelfth-century fears of social mobility and rapid intellectual change. By sharing jokes, courtiers like Gerald and John effectively invited others to join in a consensus against the accelerating pace of social transformation.90 Joking was also a way for courtiers to draw attention to their own sophistication. As John of Salisbury acknowledged in his Entheticus, courtiers were quick to joke about the “rustic words” (rustica verba) of their own native soil.91 In many cases this humor would have distanced these men from their own humbler pasts. Gerald of Wales was fond of pointing out the linguistic inferiority of his curial colleagues, with Hubert Walter being one of his favorite targets.92 At times he mimicked the babbling of the English language, and in his Gemma ecclesiastica he mocked French dignitaries for mistranslating Latin.93 At the higher end of the scale, those lucky enough to be made bishops often laughed at the expense of the  archdeacons below them.94 Joking with the archdeacon Nicholas of Sigillo, John of Salisbury told him that there was “a race of men known in the Church of God by the title archdeacons,” for whom “every road to salvation was closed.”95 Although John was not yet a bishop, he could not help joining in with the fun to be had at the expense of ambitious upstarts. As if to emphasize their own accomplished learning, Henry’s courtiers also enjoyed jokes that relied on a manipulation of language.96 Writers invested great energy in reminding their readers of the petty Latin mistakes they had heard others make. At an audience with the pope in Sens in 1164, Hilary of Chichester was remembered for making the tiniest of Latin errors. Apparently, he mixed up the imperfect tense “oportebat” with the perfect tense “oportuit,” coming up with the spurious word “oportuebat.” If we believe the chronicler Alan of Tewkesbury,

89  For example, John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, PL vol. 199, col. 828c-d. 90  On this point, see Jeannine Horowitz and Sophia Menache, L’Humour en chaire: Le rire dans l’Eglise médiévale (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1994), pp. 76–7. Here they make a similar claim for the jokes of thirteenth-century friars: “Laughter . . . worked as a mechanism for the defense of traditional values and established socio-cultural norms; it served as a shield against the sensation of vertigo that came with an uncontrollable acceleration of history.” (My translation). 91  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, 1: 11, l.139–42. 92  Gerald of Wales, Opera 2, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2:36, p. 345. 93  Gerald of Wales, Opera 2, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2: 36, p. 347. Here, Gerald tells an anecdote about Robert, the Abbot of Malmesbury, highlighting the man’s inferior Latin with the amusing example of how he mistranslated “aequum” as “cheval.” For a discussion of Gerald’s fixation on the humour of language, see Ad Putter, “Multilingualism in England and Wales, c.1200: The Testimony of Gerald of Wales,” in Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and its Neighbours, edited by Christopher Kleinhenz and Keith Busby (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 83–105. 94  For contemporary criticisms of archdeacons, see Hugh Thomas, The Secular Clergy, pp. 148–50. 95  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, Letter 140, pp. 24–5. 96  Peter Godman, observing a point of laughter at the papal curia, observed that this was an audience attuned to laughing at Latin mistakes, as it was “made up of curiales who cultivated urbanity, point, and wit.” Peter Godman, The Silent Masters: Latin Literature and its Censors in the High Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 149–50.

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100  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century when the gathering of courtiers and legates heard this mistake they all dissolved in laughter.97 Remarkably this anecdote was recopied and repeated for several decades by several different writers, and even eventually came to be translated into Icelandic.98 Never one to miss out on this kind of sport, Gerald of Wales delighted in mocking the bad grammar of one of his enemies, the archbishop Hubert Walter, who he said was laughed at for making a similar kind of Latin mistake.99 For Gerald, this kind of joke was a great way of announcing that perhaps Hubert was less well prepared for office than he was himself. By excluding those who struggled with Latin just as much as stroking the egos of those who were able to recognize the mistakes, these jokes were essentially geared to remind men like Hilary and Hubert that they did not quite belong in the facetus court circle. Complex puns were yet another vehicle for courtiers to flaunt their linguistic capabilities. Often these writers enjoyed playing with the idea that a pun on a person’s name could reveal glimpses of their innermost nature.100 Walter Map and his friends concocted a series of playful nicknames for their home towns, based on derivations of each of their names.101 Arnulf of Lisieux, in a letter to the Cardinal Henry of Pisa, quipped that because of his enigmatic qualities, the writer Ennodius’s name should rather be Innodius (an insoluble knot).102 More colorfully, John of Salisbury joked with his close friend, Peter of Celle, after their mutual acquaintance William Brito had stolen a book. “I had heard that this was the ­custom of the Greeks,” he wrote, “but I did not know that it was a custom of the Bretons (Britonum).”103 Interestingly, these sorts of puns mostly emerged in publicly circulated “personal” letters. At once intimate and playful, they worked as idealized representations of the community of courtiers. With their sharp Latin and their suitably ironic distance from the daily trials of court life, men like Arnulf and John were able to suggest that they belonged on a higher plain, somewhere above the fray of Henry II’s day-to-day court politics. Although they may have celebrated these sophisticated linguistic skills, it must be made clear that these writers also swam in a far murkier sea of humor. Jokes denigrating women, for example, were abundant. Not only were these shared and  repeated, but they apparently also provoked serious engagement. John of Salisbury’s Policraticus contains a long section full of titillating stories about 97  Becket Materials, vol. 2, Alan of Tewkesbury, pp. 336–45. 98  Becket Materials, vol. 2, Alan of Tewkesbury, pp. 336–45. As well as being recorded by Alan, the anecdote was also repeated in Gervase of Canterbury’s Chroncle, as well as in the Thomas Saga, thought to have been written originally by Robert of Cricklade. Gervasii Cantuariensis Opera Historica, edited by W. Stubbs, Rolls Series, vol. 1 (1879), p. 102; Thómas Saga Erkibyskup, edited and translated by Eiríkr Magnússon, 2 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1875), vol. 1, p. 279. 99  Gerald of Wales, Opera 2, Gemma ecclesiastica, 2: 36, p. 346. 100  On this kind of pun, see James C. Holt, What’s in a Name? Family Nomenclature and the Norman Conquest (Reading: University of Reading Press, 1982), pp. 13–15. 101  “Introduction,” in De nugis, p. xvi. For notes on Walter Map’s wordplay, see De nugis, p. 351n. 102 Arnulf, Letters, edited by Barlow, 27, p. 37. 103  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 1, 111, pp. 182–3.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  101 women defrauding husbands, which John attempted to pass off as genuine m ­ arital advice.104 One of Andreas Capellanus’s rules of love, embedded between a range of more earnest examples, was that “marriage does not constitute a proper excuse for not loving” (Causa coniugii ab amore non est excusatio recta), a sardonic slight that would not have been out of place in the fabliaux.105 Most celebrated of all was Walter Map’s letter to Rufinus. Under the aegis of advising a young man to avoid marriage, Walter’s letter gave exhaustive variations on the idea that women caused men nothing but misery. In one tale, Walter told of a man who wept after he had had three wives hang themselves on the tree in his garden. Responding in jest, a friend remarked “I wonder, after so many strokes of luck with that tree, how you can find it in you to weep,” and asked, “Friend, give me some cuttings of that tree to plant!”106 Apparently Peter of Blois enjoyed this story so much that he was compelled to retell it himself in one of his own letters.107 Here he also told the story of King Phoroneus, who had said to his friend Leontius “I would be a perfectly happy man if I lacked a wife.” When Leontius asked why, the king replied, “All married men know why.”108 It is an opaque punch line that perhaps reveals the particular appeal of this type of joke. For the courtier, the idea that wives were a chronic problem ultimately endorsed their own chosen paths of sexual abstinence and homosociality. While many courtiers were secular clerics, they often sought to distance themselves from those in the monastic life.109 Overwhelmingly, the most popular targets of literate court humor were members of the regular clergy.110 Both Gerald of Wales and Walter Map aimed great barrages of jokes at the hypocrisy of monks, with Gerald lampooning the Cluniacs and Walter the Cistercians especially.111 Far from being restrained or edifying, these jokes were packed full of venom. 104  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 2, pp. 294–306. 105  Andreas Capellanus, De amore, 2, pp. 282–3. On Andreas’s jocular intentions, and debates about the humor of the De amore, see Don  A.  Monson, “Andreas Capellanus and the Problem of Irony,” Speculum 63 (1988): pp. 539–72. For an exploration of the genre-defying subversion of Andreas’s text, see Kathleen Andersen-Wyman, Andreas Capellanus on Love? Desire, Seduction, and Subversion in a Twelfth-Century Latin Text (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). 106  Walter Map, De nugis, 4: 3, pp. 302–3. Note that Walter’s letter circulated widely among his literate contemporaries, and its stories were repeated frequently. Brooke and Mynors have identified more than forty MSS copies surviving in Britain alone, and eleven more in the BN in Paris. At least seven of the British copies were made in the thirteenth century. See the “Introduction,” in De nugis, pp. xlvii–xlix. 107  Peter of Blois, Epistolae, PL vol. 200, cols. 246a-b. 108  Peter of Blois, Epistolae, PL vol. 200, cols. 243d-244a. This story was taken from Walter Map, De nugis, 4:3, pp. 298–301. 109  For the “war” between the secular and regular clergy in England, see Hugh Thomas, The Secular Clergy, pp. 343–64. 110  On the popularity of this type of mockery more generally, see Jacques Berlioz, “Saint Bernard dans la littérature satirique. De l’Ysengrimus aux Balivernes des courtisans de Gautier Map (XIIe–XIIIe siècles),” in Vies et légendes de saint Bernard, edited by P. Arabeyre, J. Berloz, and P. Poirrier (Cîteaux: Commentarii Cistercienses, 1993), pp. 211–28. 111  David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: 940–1216 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1963), pp. 662–78; Hugh Thomas, The Secular Clergy, pp. 353–7.

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102  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Gerald of Wales, in the midst of one of his invectives, compiled a number of anecdotes of Walter Map mocking the white monks.112 Here we find Walter making edgy jokes about abbots beating novices, lusting after younger monks, and bullying landowners for extra revenues.113 In his own work, Walter also ridiculed the Cistercians for their supposed homosexuality. Hearing earnestly about how Bernard of Clairvaux had failed to revive a dead boy by lying on him, Walter responded to a gathering: “He was surely very unlucky, I have never heard of a monk lying down upon a boy without the boy immediately getting up again after him.”114 Recalling these jokes, Gerald praised them as “polite and witty” (curialibus et facetis). But in fact, they reveal just the sort of excessive and pernicious humor that John of Salisbury would have termed “excessive indulgence.”115 How to reconcile the hyped elevation of facetus humor with these more spiteful jokes? Essentially, we can say that the cultivation of humor at Henry’s court had two distinctly different functions. Both of these, however, were similarly geared to build a successful courtly identity. First, the mastery of humor was a superficial marker that announced to others that one knew the rules and habits, the modus operandi, of the court. Not wanting to be a “qui non ridet,” or to be thought dishonest or lacking in savoir-faire, laughing and joking in polite company was expected of insiders among Henry’s entourage. As Gerald of Wales made clear in his advice to his nephew, a sense of humor was coded according to its perceived politesse. But more insidiously, a sense of humor also became a way of defining, asserting, and policing a courtier’s identity. Sharing jokes about women and monks, distancing themselves from laughing in a “childish” or “feminine” way, and mocking those with poor Latin, the most popular humor in the court circle created a negative image against which men like Peter of Blois and Walter Map could see themselves as more masculine, intelligent, and successful.

Laughter as a Political Weapon So far, we have seen how courtiers adopted a sense of humor as a way of cultivating a courtly image, sharing jokes among one another to perpetuate a set of rather conservative ideals. But for a sense of laughter’s practical political value, we need to dig deeper into the combative culture of the court. Within this unique social circle, we find that humor was first and foremost used as a weapon for destroying reputations and defending honor. As Peter of Blois reflected in his letters, the terror of being laughed at was frequently experienced as a humbling “theatrical 112  On Walter’s mockery of the white monks, see Margaret Sinex, “Echoic Irony in Walter Map’s Satire against the Cistercians,” Comparative Literature, 54:4 (2002): pp. 275–90. 113  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, Speculum Ecclesiae, 3: 14, p. 220. 114  Walter Map, De nugis, 1: 24, pp. 80–1. 115  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 1: 8, Webb, vol. 1, p. 48: “. . . sed ignominiosum est grauitatem huiuscemodi lasciuia frequenter resolui.”

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  103 spectacle.”116 In an environment that keenly feared public humiliation, the shame of derisive laughter operated as a particular tool of violence that affected the very subjectivities of Henry’s courtiers. After all, this was a group that remained perpetually unsure of their status in respect of one another and the king. Over the course of the twelfth century, the range of virtues by which courtiers had traditionally been judged, such as military prowess and aristocratic blood, had slowly collapsed, to be replaced by a range of intellectual values, such as learning, diplomatic skills, and eloquence.117 Within this new political climate, humor was frequently harnessed as a means of exposing or else exploding the gaps between what people thought they should be, and what they felt that they really were underneath. Writers were apparently haunted by a fear of being ridiculed. At the most superficial level, the brief disclaimers that inaugurated many of their texts often urged readers not to laugh. The chronicler Ralph Diceto (d.1200) apologized in the prologue to his Abbreviationes chronicorum, apparently concerned that his “shameless translation” might offend the listeners and “extort the mockery of gaping mouths” (vocalium hiulca collisio subsannationem).118 It is true that these  claims were often rhetorical, covertly flagging a writer’s own humility.119 Nevertheless, they evidently spoke to a climate where being derided for one’s writing could reasonably be expected. Arnulf of Lisieux seemed genuinely concerned when he said that he was reluctant to publish his works for fear that the style of his words (cultu sermonis) might invite public laughter. “I preferred them to be condemned to the eternal shadows,” he said of his letters, “rather than be exposed as material for invidious ridicule (ridendi materiam invidiae).”120 Despite these fears, it is curious that writers usually talked of corrosive laughter as an unavoidable risk that came with making their writings publicly available. “I have chosen to make myself ridiculous by speaking,” Gerald of Wales claimed in his autobiography, “rather than, by staying silent, to appear dumb.”121 116  See Hugh Thomas, “Shame, Masculinity, and the Death of Thomas Becket,” p. 1057. 117 Ralph V. Turner, Men Raised from the Dust, p. 3; Matthew Strickland, Henry the Young King, pp. 55–77. 118  Ralph Diceto, Chronica, vol. 1 p. 19. 119  Peter of Celle, for example, used a similar formula in his letters. See The Letters of Peter of Celle, Letter 144, p. 529. (Written sometime between 1173 and 1181). Later, Adam of Eynsham used the same formula: Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, edited and translated by Decima L. Douie and David Hugh Farmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), vol. 1, 14, p. 43. This topos was also occasionally used as a comic effect. For example, Henry II’s treasurer Richard FitzNigel (d.1198) suggested in his Dialogus de Scaccario that he was too afraid to continue dictating as his pupil might “burst out laughing” at him (diu suppressus cachinnus succuteret). This was certainly an exaggerated attempt at humility, and the real laughter here is with Richard, not against him. Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario: The Dialogue of the Exchequer, edited and translated by Charles Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 68. See also a similar passage, p. 127. 120  The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 1:1, p. 1. Translation from: Carolyn Poling Schriber, The Letter Collections of Arnulf of Lisieux (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), p. 3. 121  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De rebus a se gestis, 2: 2, p. 47: “elegi potius loquendo ridiculus quam tacendo discolus inveniri.”

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104  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Above all, courtiers feared that their seeming-friends would mock them when they were out of earshot. We heard at the beginning of the chapter how Hugh of Nonant warned Thomas Becket to beware the flatterers surrounding the king, those who “outwardly smiled while deriding people behind their backs” (qui palam rident, intus derident).122 But it seems Hugh of Nonant played the role of both victim and abuser. When William Longchamp was announced as Chancellor and Justiciar in 1189, Nigel Wireker advised him of the dangers of dissimulating laughter at court, and he singled out the threat of Hugh in particular. Lambasting Hugh (who was by then Bishop of Coventry), Nigel claimed the courtier cleric “will salute him today with a quiet voice, while tomorrow he will mock him (subsannabit) as his lot falls to the ground.”123 The very status of friendship seems to have been rocked by these concerns. Daniel of Beccles, in his guide to court manners, spoke with genuine feeling about the pain that came when wickedness was found hiding behind a friendly “laughing face” (ridenti facie).124 John of Salisbury wrote of the deceptive jokes of those who pretended friendship.125 And Peter of Blois wrote a treatise on amicitia, warning about the slanderers who mocked absent friends and sacrificed their reputation all for the sake of making a joke.126 In fact, the definitive sign of deceptive friendship, in Peter’s view, was “false laughter” (risu ficto), which he said would finally reveal these false friends for what they really were.127 Understandably there was a great deal of commentary about how to defend oneself against these barrages of wounding laughter. Commentators from the beginning of Henry’s reign were mostly agreed that spiteful mockery should be countered by the Christian virtues of patience and moral courage. Writing in the 1150s, Arnulf of Lisieux told a friend that the only way to escape the “applauding laughter” (applaudencium risus) and “sycophantic refrains” (adulantium cantilenas) at the king’s court was to steer a course “in the sincerity of faith and the integrity of honest work” (cum sinceritas fidei, tum honeste operationis integritas).128 Even more vivid was John of Salisbury’s Entheticus Major. Written in 1159, the Entheticus was a long poem dedicated to the new chancellor, Thomas Becket.129 Sketching the court as full of “harmful frivolities” (nugis . . . inimica),130 John urged the reader to maintain strong morals and steadfast judgment. 122  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 52, pp. 218–19. 123  Nigel Wireker, Tractatus contra curiales, p. 147. “Curia quos hodie submissa voce salutat, cras subsannabit, sorte cadente sua.” 124  Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus, p. 27, l.755–8; and p. 24, l.672–5. 125  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 1, Letter 93, pp. 196–7. 126  Peter of Blois, De amicitia Christiana et de caritate Dei et proximi, PL vol. 207, cols. 871–958: col. 886a. “. . . qui captat risus hominum.” Peter here cites Horace, Satires, I, 4, l.81–5. 127  Peter of Blois, De amicitia, col. 886b-c. 128  The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Letter 10, pp. 13–14. Translation from Schriber, pp. 190–1. 129  For a discussion of the Entheticus, see Rodney M. Thomson, “What is the Entheticus?” in The World of John of Salisbury, edited by Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 287–301; and Ronald E. Pepin, “The Entheticus of John of Salisbury: A Critical Text,” Traditio 31 (1975): pp. 127–93. 130  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Minor, 9, pp. 238–9. “Omnia, si nescis, loca sunt plenissima nugis, quarum tota cohors est inimica tibi.”

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  105 If virtue shapes your soul, and the form of truth your tongue, if mother grace fosters your work, then the defender of freedom will love you and will cause you to go safely on any road whatever. Under his leadership you will be safe in the cloister, safe in the court, safe in ambushes, you will be safe everywhere.131

If they confronted mocking laughter, John urged courtiers to shield themselves with a face “harder than steel” (frons adamante). If they felt a genuine fear of being “stained by the mark of vice” (timeat vitii sordidus), he said, then this would allow them to expose the “babble of tongues” and “empty sounds” as both impotent and irrelevant.132 By taking a skeptical distance, John effectively encouraged courtiers to split their exterior from their interior.133 Yet while he saw dangers in mockery, John also recognized its potential for building resilience and moral courage. Ultimately, the sense of the Entheticus seems to be that mocking laughter would improve a courtier’s moral character, just as surely as iron would be tempered by fire. A far more cynical form of defense appeared in the work of Walter Map. Writing in the 1180s, Walter argued that the best way of deflecting court mockery was by doubling the self. To combat the “secret ridicule” (clam detrahent) that flooded political life, he suggested that courtiers should “keep a sincere devotion in the hidden purity of the heart” (in cordis archana puritate sincera devocio celebretur). Walter explored this ambiguous space between inner being and outer seeming throughout his De nugis, conjuring a range of walking corpses, hypocritical monks, and frightful ghosts.134 In counterpoint to these deceptive beings, Walter’s ideal courtier also needed to retain a split between their inward and their external being. By doing so, whatever the “outward aspects” of their behavior, such as the experience of mockery or sordid jokes, they would nevertheless be able to preserve intact their “inner man” (interiorem hominem) beneath.135 Walter’s sense of a split self was shared by many of his contemporaries. The satirist Nigel Wireker, while advising the new Royal Chancellor William Longchamp, told him that at the court he would suffer derision to the extent that his “interior would be made open” (omnia fac pateant interiora tui).136 By extension, these ideas were guided by wider concerns about the relationship between inner motivation and outward emotional expression. Reflecting on the merits of weeping, Peter of Blois remarked that the compassion channeled through tears—no matter how genuine it might seem to the courtier himself—was superficial unless it was 131  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, III: 89, pp. 192–3. 132  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Minor, 14, pp. 242–5. 133  On this issue, see Christophe Grellard, Jean de Salisbury et la renaissance médiévale du scepticisme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013), pp. 170–8. 134  Stephen Gordon, “Monstrous Words, Monstrous Bodies: Irony and the Walking Dead in Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium,” English Studies 96:4 (2015): pp. 379–402; Margaret Sinex, “Echoic Irony,” pp. 275–90. 135  Walter Map, De Nugis, 4:13, pp. 372–5. 136  Nigel Wireker, Tractatus contra curiales, p. 148.

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106  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century guided, ultimately, by a committed love for God.137 Peter Dronke has observed that this sort of thinking marked a changing attitude to the self in the latter part of the twelfth century.138 It may well be that the anxieties triggered by excessive court mockery profoundly affected the cultivation of introspection. Fostering an imagined separation of the interior from the exterior, the fear of suffering laughter ultimately hardened the cynicism of political life at Henry’s court.139 Extending this cynical social climate to the page, humor was easily mobilized as a weapon of written debate. Sarcastic letters and derisive invectives were a popular form among the ambitious literati at Henry’s court. Two of the longer works of invective produced in the twelfth century were written by Henry’s courtiers, albeit slightly before and after Henry’s years on the throne. Written in response to the papal schism of 1130, Arnulf of Lisieux’s Invectiva was a scorching and often hilarious diatribe against Bishop Gerard of Angoulême. Above all, Arnulf used innuendo and witty insults to attack his opponent.140 This was a reactive work, however, one that was essentially bound up with the tense struggles then taking place in distant Rome. Closer to the ordinary world of English court politics was Gerald of Wales’s Speculum Duorum, a long letter intended to publicly shame the writer’s own nephew. Gerald’s letter was a work that circulated throughout the cathedrals and religious houses of England, and, despite the fact that in it he castigated his nephew’s own inappropriate sarcasm on several occasions, it was full of aggressive humor.141 In the midst of intense anger, for instance, Gerald turned to the humorous tactic of hyperbolic praise, referring to the youth as “our own outstanding and generous nephew” (nepos noster egregius, liberalis).142 Beyond the page, this wounding humor had a sharp and decisive social dimension. Whether in public debates or private audiences with the king, derision often worked as an effective tool for dismantling political reputations. By all accounts this threat emanated from the highest reaches of Henry II’s inner circle. As John of Salisbury warned, whenever legates had appointments with the king, they

137  Peter of Blois, Liber de confessione sacramentali, PL 207, col. 1088b-1089a. 138  Peter Dronke, “Peter of Blois at the Court of Henry II,” Medieval Studies 38 (1976): pp. 185–235. 139 My arguments here draw on the ideas about role-playing at Henry’s court put forward by Stephen Jaeger. Jaeger argued, for instance, that John of Salisbury used irony in cultivating a court persona that, like a mask, was a detached adjunct to the self—a self that retained “no firm character” and which was constantly relativized and deferred by rhetorical strategies. C. Stephen Jaeger, “Irony and Role-Playing in John of Salisbury and the Becket Circle,” in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224)—Actes du colloque tenu à Poitiers du 2 au 5 mai 2002, edited by Martin Aurell, 319–31 (Poitiers: Civilisation Médiévale, 2003), pp. 319–31. 140  Arnulf of Lisieux, Invectiva in Girardium, pp. 81–108. See also Lindy Grant, “Arnulf ’s Mentor: Geoffrey of Leves, Bishop of Chartres,” in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: essays in honour of Frank Barlow, edited by D. Bates, J. Crick, and S. Hamilton (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), pp. 173–84. 141 In a letter to Hugh, William, and Ralph, the dean, precentor, and canon, respectively, of Hereford, Gerald explained that he intended the Speculum Duorum, which they at Hereford had read and disagreed with, to serve as a warning and wreck his nephew’s reputation. Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, pp. 162–3. 142  Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, pp. 190–1.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  107 always made careful preparations to avoid exposing themselves to the type of ridicule that might bring “laughter and the disgrace of failure” (risu aut ruinae turpiter).143 This was a lesson that Thomas Becket came to learn both in theory and in practice. As we saw at the very beginning of this chapter, Thomas received frantic advice from court insiders when he was made Royal Chancellor in 1155. Nearly all of this advice highlighted the damage that mocking humor could do to his reputation. Writing in April 1155, Arnulf of Lisieux warned Becket that he should be careful of the “sudden striking laughter” (subitos applaudencium risus) of Henry’s sycophants, which he said would be aimed at him if he fell out with the king. These obsequious foes, Arnulf insisted, would ruthlessly “seek out old injuries” in order to degrade his reputation.144 Even the pope, far away in Rome, seems to have been anxiously aware of the political danger of humor at Henry’s court. Between Becket’s confrontations with the king at Clarendon and Northampton in 1164, Pope Alexander asked the archbishop to tone down his demands, citing among other reasons a fear of being derided himself. “Defer to the king,” he advised, “lest by doing otherwise you . . . enable those who do not walk in the same spirit to deride and mock (insultare) both of us because of it.”145 Sure enough, a wave of derisive laughter followed thick and fast after Becket fell out with the king. Although he was then in exile, Thomas’s allies were so alarmed by the mockery that they wrote a flurry of letters to report it back to him. In 1165, an anonymous friend wrote to tell him how the king’s Justiciar, Richard de Lucy, had made jokes about him to the king, using “trifles” (nugarum) to discredit him.146 Another letter, written possibly by John of Salisbury in 1167, described in detail how the English bishops ridiculed Thomas at a council with the two cardinals, William of Pavia and Otto of Brescia. According to this letter, Gilbert Foliot had set the tone by ridiculing Becket’s financial mismanagement.147 Deeply affected by all this derision, Thomas sought to connect it with the broader cause he was championing for the Church. On more than one occasion he complained bitterly in his letters about how the mocking laughter of the king’s nobles was impeding ecclesiastical affairs at court.148 When all was said and done, the mocking humor of courtiers was not enough on its own to precipitate Becket’s political downfall. Yet, we can certainly say that it speeded his decline once the king’s favor had been turned against him. This seems to have been the general pattern of mockery at Henry’s court: public derision following on the breeze of royal condemnation.149 In the winter of 1180, the 143  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, Letter 176, pp. 166–7. 144  The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, Letter 10, p. 14. Translated in Schriber, 3:02, pp. 190–1. 145  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 26, pp. 82–3. 146  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 43, pp. 176–8. 147  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 149, p. 690–1. 148  Becket Materials, vol. 7, Letter 95; Becket Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 319, pp. 1130–31; Becket Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 219, pp. 964–5. 149  Another example is Richard, Archbishop of York, who angered the king after bumbling in negotiations with a papal legate. Egbert Türk, Nugae curialium: Le règne d’Henri II Plantagenêt (1145–1189)

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108  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century king’s illegitimate son Geoffrey was doubly chastised, first by his father for poor management of his diocese, and then by the pope for failing to qualify in the holy orders necessary for his position as Bishop of Lincoln.150 Consequently, Geoffrey was forced to give up his bishopric. When he came to announce his resignation at Marlborough in January 1181, Walter Map sealed his humiliation with a very public joke at his expense. Geoffrey already had a reputation for poor learning, and Walter took him apart for it. At the hearing Geoffrey was prompted to speak, but in reply could only mutter in broken French. When the question “What do you say?” was asked a second time, Walter broke in to answer in Geoffrey’s place, “French of Marlborough!” The joke was a cruel reference to a local spring, which was said to leave those who drank from it speaking only barbarous French. Knowing his reputation was sunk in this moment, and hearing the roar of laughter, Geoffrey apparently withdrew in anger (Ridentibus igitur aliis, ipse recessit iratus).151 But no courtier was more vocal about how his political career had suffered from curial derision than Gerald of Wales. After he was snubbed in his ambitions of attaining the bishopric of St David’s, by Gerald’s own admission he was subjected to a barrage of jokes. It was well known that he had desired the bishopric, and his candidacy was strong, having been elected by the cathedral chapter. Yet King Henry ultimately overlooked him in favor of one of his retainers, Peter de Leia (d.1198). According to his own account, after this rejection Gerald became a laughing stock. Apparently the culmination of his humiliation came when the king made a public slur against him, joking with his familiars that he would have been worthy of a more honorable position had he not been Welsh.152 Brooding over this ridicule in his autobiography, Gerald complained that he had “received nothing from the king except empty promises and flattery.”153 Sealing his political demise, colleagues now took it as open season to taunt him. One clerk publicly mocked Gerald with a cruel pantomime. “Do you desire the bishopric of Mynyw [St David’s]?” the clerk asked Gerald, before impersonating him and shouting “I do” followed by a huge cackle (cachinnum).154 et l’ethique politique (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1977), p. 197. Peter of Blois warned Richard: “You are gossiped about, and are the study of nearly every tongue, loosened in frivolous abominable whisperings against you.” (Estis enim fabula in ore hominum, studiumque omnium fere commune est linguas ­procaces laxare contra vos in detestandum susurrium). PL vol. 207, Epistolae, 5, cols. 14c-15a. 150  On Geoffrey, see Marie Lovatt, “Archbishop Geoffrey of York: A Problem in Anglo-French Maternity,” in Records, Administration and Aristocratic Society in the Anglo-Norman Realm, edited by Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 91–123. 151  Walter Map, De nugis, 5: 6, pp. 496–7. This was not the only time that Walter publicly mocked Geoffrey for his speech. On another occasion, Walter compared Geoffrey’s answer to the farting of an archbishop’s wife. (De nugis, 5: 6, pp. 498–9). On this anecdote and its significance for understanding linguistic preferences at court, see Ad Putter, “Multilingualism,” pp. 89–90. 152  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De rebus, II, 9, p. 60. 153  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De rebus, II, 9, p. 60: “. . . nihil tamen a Rege praeter laudes hujusmodi vanas et adulationes cum promissis magnis accepit.” 154  Gerald of Wales, Opera 3, De iure et statu, 7, p. 338.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  109 Perhaps the most vivid example of laughter bringing down a career was the scandal surrounding William Longchamp (d.1197). Formerly bishop of Ely, William was named Chancellor and Justiciar shortly after Henry II died in 1189. Although he was not free of enemies when he assumed his position, William’s reputation suffered terribly in 1191 after he arrested Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, and soon afterwards he was stripped of his offices by the order of a council of magnates.155 One of the main complaints commentators had about William was his excessive joking. According to many, William turned his humor against those who did not deserve it (a failing that, as we know, would disqualify him from being entirely facetus). Reflecting on Longchamp’s career after many years, Gerald of Wales described how the man’s “simulated laughter” (simulatoque risui) and “insincere rictus of the mouth” (ficto continuoque fere oris rictui) were marks of his deceit.156 Ralph Diceto, elsewhere, compared Longchamp to the classical figure of Arvandus, who he said spent too much time “laughing with his associates” (colloquia cunctorum ridebat) and held his office in contempt.157 William’s nephew, Nigel Wireker, even warned him in a long treatise of the pitfalls of too much laughter. Nigel’s Tractatus contra curiales, written as William moved from his episcopal duties to take office at the royal court, heavily stressed the dangers of mockery, which he said was “the way of the court” (joci sint ibi more loci).158 William would have to be extra careful in this atmosphere to retain his dignity. Posing the question, “Where does a bishop become a rustic?” Nigel answered decisively, “at the exchequer’s table!”159 Soon, charges of excessive mockery became the central justification for William’s removal from office. Most damning of all was the excoriating letter written to the pope by William’s chief enemy, Hugh of Nonant. As Prince John’s “chief propagandist,” Hugh felt compelled to smear King Richard’s right-hand man as best he could.160 Significantly, he chose to sketch William’s downfall as a story of somebody who had laughed too much now becoming a laughing stock himself. According to Hugh’s letter, William was known for his laughter, and was often seen with “mockery through his nose, and a cackle in his mouth” (subsannationem in naribus, cachinnum in ore).161 But these clamors of laughter, Hugh said, had reached up to God in heaven (ascendit clamor ejus ad Dominum), which meant that divine punishment was now decisively set against him.162 Describing William’s downfall, Hugh lingered on his comic humiliation. He recounted how 155  On William Longchamp, see David Bruce Balfour, “William Longchamp: Upward Mobility and Character Assassination in Twelfth-Century England,” PhD dissertation University of Connecticut, 1996). 156  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, De Vita Galfridi Eboracensis, 19, p. 420. 157  Ralph Diceto, Ymagines historiarum, vol. 2, p. 101. 158  Nigel Wireker, Tractatus contra curiales, p. 149. 159  Nigel Wireker, Tractatus contra curiales, p. 190. 160  John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 228. 161  Hugh’s letter is reproduced in Roger of Howden, Chronica, vol. 3, pp. 142–3. 162  Roger of Howden, Chronica, p. 143.

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110  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century William fled his enemies by disguising himself as a woman, and he squeezed the story for all its mocking potential. “He pretended to be a woman, a sex he always hated!” he said, and referred to how a lusty sailor on a Dover beach mistook him for a prostitute, before grabbing his genitals and exclaiming “Come see this marvel everyone, I’ve discovered that this woman is a man!”163 By these humiliations, Hugh said, William had become a character worthy of universal laughter. “Oh the shame!” he said, “The man was made a woman; the chancellor a ‘chancelloress’; the priest a prostitute; the bishop a buffoon.”164 By Hugh’s estimation, it was all rather fitting that the chancellor who mocked everybody had now ended up being ridiculed by all the people of England.165 Hugh’s mocking letter caused instant controversy. Foremost among its critics was Peter of Blois, who condemned Hugh for dragging the name of a “wise, loveable, generous, and benign” bishop into the mud.166 Particularly offensive, Peter felt, was Hugh’s mocking language: “Oh slanderous tongue!” he complained, “Oh abusive and painful tongue!”167 A highly persuasive writer himself, Peter well understood the power a vivid letter could have in manipulating a reader’s emotions. “Publicly you boast and throw around your words,” he said, “duping those who are off their guard.”168 Undoubtedly, Peter’s grievance was that Hugh had resorted to defamation through humiliating mockery, a type of defamation that he found particularly cruel. And, given the publicity that his popular letter collection commanded, this was a level of attention that ensured the debate would touch a large proportion of the late-twelfth-century literate world.169 Through both the controversy and the backlash, the Longchamp affair illuminates the dual political power of laughter at the royal court. Just as inappropriate humor tarnished his reputation, harsh joking became the mode of his public punishment. This pattern repeated the fate of Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and ­perhaps especially Thomas Becket. While mocking one’s rivals could be very effective for establishing authority, when the wheel of fortune turned, particularly following a swift plummet in royal favor, mockery also proved an irresistible weapon for those rivals to speed his downfall. “While courtiers greet people with respect today,” as Nigel Wireker warned Longchamp in his Tractatus, “tomorrow 163  Roger of Howden, Chronica, p. 146. 164  Roger of Howden, Chronica, p. 146: “Proh dolor! Vir factus est foemina; cancellarius cancellaria; sacerdos meretrix; episcopus scurra.” 165  Roger of Howden, Chronica, p. 147: “Factus est enim opprobrium vicinis suis valde, et timor notis suis, et datus est in derisum omni populo.” 166  Peter’s letter was originally printed as Letter 89 in Epistolae, PL vol. 207. It is also reproduced immediately after Hugh’s letter in Roger of Howden, Chronica, vol. 3, pp. 148–50. 167  Roger of Howden, Chronica, p. 149. 168  Roger of Howden, Chronica, p. 149. “Publice gloriaris et jactitas, quod hanc turbem moveris, quod incautum deceperis.” 169  Although Peter’s letter is reproduced alongside Hugh’s in the Rolls Series edition of Roger of Howden’s Chronica, as the editor points out this was a later addition to the MSS, not made by Roger himself. Nevertheless, the addition illustrates something of the enduring interest the issue had into the thirteenth century.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  111 they mock them as they fall.” (Curia quos hodie submissa voce salutat, Cras ­subsannabit, sorte cadente sua).170

“Through Laughing, Telling the Truth” As we saw in the first chapter, the classical satirist Horace’s idea of “through laughing, telling the truth” (per ridentem dicere verum) had a great resonance with the writers surrounding Henry II. When John of Salisbury suggested in his Entheticus that courtiers should adapt “frivolities to useful things and serious things to games,” he touched on the increasingly popular sense that humor could be a truth-telling device.171 If we believe accusations of widespread corruption within Henry II’s circle, then it is easy to see why this would have been a useful strategy.172 Specifically, laughter allowed courtiers to say things that were otherwise difficult or too awkward to express. Ranging from the subtle negotiation of hierarchies to the indirect criticism of power, the communicative effects of jokes opened up an alternative arena of discourse at the royal court. At a literary level, meanwhile, the booming role of satire played a very important role. Writers such as Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, and Nigel Wireker devotedly read Horace and Juvenal, and, in works such as the Speculum Stultorum, De nugis curialium, and the Entheticus, satire achieved its medieval apotheosis.173 By looking awry at current affairs, comparing the court to Hell or seeing Henry II as Vespasian, these writers used humor to open up a channel of criticism and commentary on political life that, if said in full seriousness, would have been condemned as reprehensible.174 Importantly, it appears these social and literary dimensions worked in harmony. The same men who wrote revelatory satires were, tellingly, also those who emphasized the truth-telling benefits of laughter in their own political experiences. Both Walter Map and Gerald of Wales were acutely aware that humor was often the only acceptable way courtiers could communicate delicate information to one another. It was especially useful for airing awkward truths. Walter Map 170  Nigel Wireker, Tractatus contra curiales, p. 147. 171  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Minor, 6, pp. 236–7. 172  Hugh Thomas, The Secular Clergy, pp. 150–1. 173  On twelfth-century satire, see Rodney  M.  Thomson, “The Origins of Twelfth-Century Latin Satire,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 13 (1978): pp. 73–83. On the pre-eminence of satire at Henry II’s court, see A.  G.  Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature: 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 69, 73; Ronald  E.  Pepin, Literature of Satire in the Twelfth Century: A Neglected Medieval Genre (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), pp. 1–24. On the purpose of satire as a tool for combatting vice, see Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 144–5. For an alternative view, see Stephen Gordon, “Monstrous Words, Monstrous Bodies.” 174  See for example Rodney M. Thomson, “The Satirical Works of Berengar of Poitiers: An Edition with Introduction,” Mediaeval Studies 42 (1980): pp. 89–138: especially pp. 100–3. For further discussion of these major tropes of twelfth-century satire, see Ronald E. Pepin, Literature of Satire, especially the introduction.

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112  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century used a joke (ait . . . cum ioco) to bring to the surface a friend’s miserliness, laughing that although the friend appeared poor because he spent so little money, “everyone knew that really he was hiding his riches.”175 Although this anecdote was only copied down in a manuscript decades later, it served as an example of how humor could open delicate criticisms up for public discussion.176 Gerald of Wales elsewhere recalled how Bishop Roger of Worcester, one of Henry II’s close associates, used a similar joke to expose the meanness of Archbishop Roger of York. When the archbishop tore his cloak in a scuffle at the dinner table, Roger joked that “the  cope was decades old, and would have fallen to bits in the crush anyway.” According to Gerald, the king and his company all laughed at this, seeing in the joke the truth of the archbishop’s finances as if for the first time.177 It is hard to imagine how either Walter or Roger could have articulated these criticisms of character outside the forgiving framework of a joke. At the highest end of the social spectrum, joking could also be an effective way of speaking truth to power. Bernart of Ventadorn, the troubadour poet who spent a number of years in the royal entourage, included in one of his songs a joke aimed at Henry II himself. Lightly claiming that he would never go to the king if it meant forsaking his lover, Bernart explained that the king didn’t need him anyway, as he already had “Normandy, Touraine, Poitou, Anjou, and they suit him so well, he wants the whole world.”178 Undoubtedly this was a little joke at Henry’s territorial ambitions. As Bernart was at this point a regular performer for the king, he evidently intended him to hear the playful comment and take its delicate criticism. As we know from a similar anecdote told by the monastic chronicler Adam of Eynsham (d.c.1233), this was a tactic of criticism that Henry appreciated so long as it came from somebody he respected. Once when Henry lay sewing, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln rebuked him with a joke: “How like your cousins from Falaise you look!” Hugh’s joke implied that Henry was the grandson of a bastard who had secretly been fathered by a family of weavers, a suggestion that had the king throwing his head back in hysterics.179 Above all it was the culture of satirical writing at Henry’s court that gave truth-telling humor its strongest theoretical support. Perhaps the finest work of twelfth-century satire was Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum. Little is known 175  Walter Map, De nugis, pp. 515–16. 176  Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 32, f.94v. “Ex dictis W. Map. ” This is number 26 of a series of stories written out sometime in the thirteenth century. I am grateful to Professor Nicholas Vincent for bringing this reference to my attention. 177  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, 28, p. 63. 178  Bernart de Ventadorn, Love Songs, P-C 70, 21, pp. 142–3. 179  Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, vol. 1, p. 117. This episode, and its implications, will be discussed in Chapter  5, below. An expansive reading of this anecdote can be found in Karl  J.  Leyser, “The Angevin Kings and the Holy Man,” in St Hugh of Lincoln: Lectures delivered at Oxford and Lincoln to celebrate the eighth centenary of St Hugh’s consecration as Bishop of Lincoln, edited by Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 49–73; pp. 59–60. For other readings, see Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” p. 319; and Katrin Beyer, “Wit and Irony,” pp. 153–4.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  113 for sure about Nigel’s life, other than that he became a monk at Christ Church Canterbury around 1170. Certainly he knew Thomas Becket and followed his career closely, and by extension we can infer that he was familiar with life at the English court in the era of Henry II.180 Written sometime around 1180, and dedicated to his uncle William Longchamp, Nigel’s Speculum is a long satirical poem detailing the struggles of an ass named Burnel, who goes off to study in Salerno and Paris before dropping out and founding a religious order of his own. The Speculum primarily works as a damning criticism of twelfth-century schools, which Nigel presents as full of vain pupils studying meaningless logic. For example, Burnel only seeks an education in the first place as he has been told that it will give him a longer tail, and at Paris the only lasting lesson he learns is how to drink and say “hee-haw.”181 Yet Nigel extends his critique, targeting the falseness of the royal court, the avarice of the clergy, and the sensuality of monks. Echoing Juvenal, who said that when there is so much hypocrisy in society “it is difficult for us not to write satire” (difficile nobis est satiram non scribere), Nigel’s poetry was meant to shine a light on the gaping disconnections between ideals and realities in twelfth-century life.182 While Nigel aimed at revealing “from frivolities . . . serious things” (ex nugis . . . seria), he did not intend any simple or direct process of revelation.183 Explaining his satirical theory, he turned to the metaphor of the mirror, the speculum of fools. Just as a mirror offered a snapshot and left no enduring representation on the mind, Nigel argued that his own satire would show a fleeting image, one that was angled to elude the foolish while simultaneously informing the cognoscenti.184 Simple reading was not sufficient for this material, he said. Instead, satire demanded a rigorous participation of the intellect, and a keen mind that could make the imaginative leap from a passing image to a lasting and transformative impression.185 So, while those who read Nigel’s “mirror” without intelligence might have seen something ridiculous, he assured them that if they inspected it with subtlety and careful attention they would discover hidden within a message that was altogether more profound.186 With this evocative image, Nigel essentially conceived satire as a means of realizing truth through participation. Only with correct orientation and proper preparation could readers see satirical objects for what they really were in Nigel’s mirror. 180  Jan  M.  Ziolkowski, “Introduction,” in Nigel of Canterbury, The Passion of St Lawrence/Passio Sancti Laurentii Martiris, edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 11. 181  Nigel de Longchamps Speculum Stultorum, edited with an introduction by John H. Mozley and Robert R. Raymo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 58–60. 182 Juvenal, Satires, 1: 30. 183  Nigel Wireker, Speculum Stultorum, p. 31. 184  Nigel’s letter, explaining the meaning of the Speculum Stultorum to William Longchamp, is reproduced in Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century, edited by Thomas F. Wright (Rolls Series, 1872), vol. 1, p. 3. 185  On the image of the mirror according to twelfth-century theologians, particularly in relief to the imprint, see Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak, When Ego was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 180–6. 186  Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets, p. 3.

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114  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Alongside the impressive work of Nigel Wireker, we cannot overlook the unique satirical theory of other writers at Henry’s court. Generally speaking, the satirical works produced in this circle insisted that the genre had a benefit not only as an ethical tool, but also as a way of articulating truths that could otherwise not be put into simple words.187 John of Salisbury’s Entheticus in particular demonstrated a more erudite facility with classical satire.188 Among more sincere passages, the Entheticus some provocative ironic advice. “Read little, to know much,” was one of John’s suggestions, a dead-pan comment coming from a writer who had seemingly read all of the classical authors available to his generation.189 Much of John’s mock advice was intended as a harsh rebuke of the anti-intellectual and glib culture that he felt was dominating Henry II’s court. It was far better, he said, to be criticized in this indirect way than to be “praised by one who is mistaken, or by somebody who seeks to flatter.”190 By provoking laughter at poor behavior, he explained elsewhere, his criticism worked by counter-example. People were supposed to laugh at his satirical observations and then learn to correct their own conduct accordingly.191 For these purposes, John provided an elaborate satire of Henry II’s court itself.192 In part three of the Entheticus, he imagined a “crazy court,” populated by a series of parodic curiales, all thinly disguised versions of Henry’s real entourage. Mandroger, “the royalist,” was shown as a close advisor to the king and was likely modeled on either Robert of Beaumont or Richard de Lucy. Abusing his position, Mandroger adopted the laws to his own ends, boasting “that he alone preserves the crown.”193 Another of John’s satirical figures was Pedo, a jealous villain who “murmured” in the ears of his rivals and poisoned “the inner working” of their “heart and mouth.”194 With Juvenalian gusto, John described a court that had gone crazy (insanire), jettisoning both the arts and the law in favor of “trifles” (nugae). Explaining this style of satire in the Policraticus, John insisted that

187  On the plurality of modes of medieval satire, see. Ben Parsons, “ ‘A Riotous Spray of Words’: Rethinking the Medieval Theory of Satire,” Exemplaria 21:2 (2009): 105–28. 188  On aspects of how John sought to offer advice through satire in the Entheticus, see Jonathan M.  Newman, “Satire Between School and Court: The Ethical Interpretation of the Artes in John of Salisbury’s Entheticus in dogmata philosophorum,” Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2008): pp. 125–42. 189  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, 1:8, pp. 110–11. 190  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 1, p. 231: “Familiare siquidem sapienti est, ut magno placet Augustino, potius a quolibet reprehendi quam sive ab errante sive ab adulante laudari.” 191  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 7:14, vol. 2, pp. 152–3. On this technique in the work of twelfthcentury writers more widely, see Mia Münster-Swendsen, “Irony and the Author: The Case of the Dialogues of Lawrence of Durham,” in Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages, edited by Slavica Rankovic, with Ingvil Brügger Budal, Aidan Conti, Leidulf Melve, and Else Mundal (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2012), pp. 151–70, p. 169. 192  A sharp view of John’s court criticism is given in Frédérique Lachaud, “La figure du clerc curial dans l’oeuvre de Jean de Salisbury,” in La cour du prince: cour de France, cours d’Europe XIIe–XVe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), pp. 301–20. 193  Entheticus Major, III: 90, pp. 194–5. 194  Entheticus Major, III: 112, pp. 216–17.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  115 laughable distortions of this kind were useful as negative representations of the truth.195 In accordance with Horatian satire, John sought to “touch every fault,” provoking a laughter that might “play with the heart” (circum praecordia ludit).196 If John felt the satirical method could lead to higher truths, he was also deeply concerned with its power to obscure. Throughout his work he played with the dual potential of falseness, and how mockery could both hide and reveal. Exasperated, at one point he condemned flatterers for “administering” their poison “covered in honey,” and for concealing truth with fictions (venena, inquit sapiens, non dantur nisi melle circumlita).197 Yet, in the very same chapter of the Policraticus, John justified his own method of using stories to “divulge the truth” as just another kind of lying (mendacia poetarum serviunt veritati).198 The art was in discerning between these two types of lie. As he warned, jokes (iocis) and “worldly fantasies” (phantasmia mundi) were dangerous precisely because they “blinded the sight” of the courtier (his etenim visum praestruit illa iocis).199 Making “reality out of nonsense” was a broader symptom, for John, of a creeping intellectual detachment from logic and truth at the court.200 In his Metalogicon, associated this vice with the laughing figure of Cornificus, whose frivolous attitude to logic and academic debate twisted learning beyond value and recognition.201 The remedy for this disease, according to the advice John gave to Thomas Becket, was not to abandon all humor, but rather to become an expert reader of jokes. By cultivating a “philosophic attitude towards others’ frivolities,” (philosopharis in nugis alienis), he said, Thomas might become a truly enlightened critic.202 Drawing a striking comparison, John even imagined this discretion of seeing truth within a joke as a parallel to the Christian practice of finding faith in hidden things.203 Walter Map explored similar tensions in his satirical writing. Although he was celebrated in his own time for his jokes, Walter valued satire as a sophisticated form of critique.204 His De nugis curialium includes biting satirical attacks on the royal court, the clergy, and the hypocrisy of many of his contemporaries. 195  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 8:11, vol. 2, p. 301. 196  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 8:11, vol. 2, p. 301. 197  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 1, 3: 6, p. 186. 198  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 1, 3: 6, p. 186. 199  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, 1: 20, p. 122. 200 Michael Wilks, “John of Salisbury and the Tyranny of Nonsense,” in The World of John of Salisbury, edited by Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 263–87. 201  See, for example, John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, PL vol. 199, col. 828c-d. See also for laughter similar to that of Cornificius’s: John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 1, 2:26, p. 140. 202  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 1, 2: Prologue, p. 65. 203  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, 1: 15, pp. 118–19: “Rem veram tegat interdum fallacia verbi; dum res vera subest, vera figura manet, falsa tamen verbi facie, sed mente fidelis, dum facit arcanam rebus inesse fidem.” 204  Gerald of Wales praised Walter’s wit on a number of occasions. See Alan K. Bate, “Walter Map and Giraldus Cambrensis,” Latomus 31 (1972): pp. 860–75. For a new view of Walter, see Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). See also Alan K. Bate, “Introduction,” in Gautier Map: Contes pour les gens de cour, edited by Alan K. Bate (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993): pp. 5–76.

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116  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Although Walter occasionally claimed his work was intended simply to entertain, behind the humility lay a far more ambitious purpose.205 Throughout the text he articulated a robust theory of humor’s potential to “tend to moral improvement” (ad mores tendat instruccio).206 Outlining this distinction, he explained that his humor was meant to speak on one level to casual readers and on another to those with greater powers of discernment. In a concluding gloss on one witty story he warned that although the anecdote might seem frivolous (frivola) to lazy minds, those readers were not his intended audience. Instead, he said, he wrote for the “busy bees,” those who knew that in order to make honeycomb you sometimes had to use “wormwood and thyme.” Walter hoped that his ideal reader would then, by attending to the implicit message of his humor, be able to take valuable life lessons from these frivolous things (ex frivolis his), such as the “power to choose and to love the bitter paths to justice.”207 Concerned above all with moral resolution, Walter’s satire in De nugis uniquely focused on humor’s ability to destabilize the self. In this respect, Walter’s story of the merchant Ollo is an exceptional set-piece.208 In the story, Walter describes how a certain Sceva devised a plan to trick his friend Ollo, who had become rich, mean, and profligate. Having persuaded everyone in town, including Ollo’s wife, to pretend not to recognize Ollo, Sceva insisted that they should all laugh whenever Ollo claimed to be himself. So it happened that, when Ollo arrived back in town, everybody laughed at him uproariously (cum maximo cachinno) wherever he went. For Ollo, encountering this laughter became a trigger for a profound reflection on who he was and what he lived for. It ended up transforming him for the better, leading him in the process to deeper levels of self-understanding. As Walter glossed the tale, the humiliation of the laughter made Ollo look “through everybody else’s eyes,” which in the process encouraged him to learn to “derive his estimate of self not so much from himself as from other men.”209 Reflecting on laughter more generally, Walter also imagined it to be the natural way of being in the world.210 After describing a friend who had lost his former “wit and customs of joking” (perierat facecia morosaque iocunditas), Walter felt it necessary to write him an amusing letter with the aim of saving him from extremes of arrogance and solitude, if not from the death itself that he thought

205  Robert Levine, “How to Read Walter Map,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 23 (1988): pp. 91–105: p. 93. Joshua Byron Smith makes a persuasive argument for the careful organization of De nugis curialium, with reference to twelfth-century rhetorical patterns, in Walter Map and the Matter of Britain, pp. 37–62. 206  Walter Map, De nugis, 1:12, pp. 36–7. For an alternative view, emphasizing Walter’s deliberately ambivalent motives and his principles of Menippean satire, see Stephen Gordon, “Monstrous Words, Monstrous Bodies,” pp. 379–402. 207  Walter Map, De nugis, 3:2, pp. 244–5. 208  Walter Map, De nugis, 4:16, pp. 392–403. 209  Walter Map, De nugis, 4:16, pp. 402–3. 210  See how Walter complained that, due to jealous ambition, the ordinary habits of laughter were being prevented and replaced by anxiety in the court. De nugis, 1:1, pp. 4–5.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  117 would arise from a lack of laughter.211 Despite his sense of its necessity to life, however, Walter remained deeply critical of any laughter that came without a good purpose. His story about the knight Eudo, for instance, fiercely illustrated the ­diabolical dangers of misguided humor. When Eudo was taunted by demons, Walter described how their jokes “concealed the true form” of things. In these kinds of perverse jokes, a “false and laughable semblance” obscured any truth that may have been present or possible (ut veritate contecta vana ridiculaque simultas appareat).212 By contrast, Walter’s sense of “true” laughter was as a tool that could bring clarity to those able to read it properly. Intended solely for private circulation, De nugis curialium was never meant to provoke public scandal.213 And unlike his near contemporary Gervase of Tilbury, whose Otia Imperialia was dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor, Walter did not set out to refresh weary minds with novelties.214 Instead he wrote for the discerning readers at court who, to echo Horace, he believed could see truth through laughter.215 Some historians have suggested that Walter’s skittish methods dodged any higher truth or meaning, and they are certainly right to point to his fluctuating lenses and styles.216 Yet buried in his De nugis is a theory of satire that connected humor with deep introspection, moral renewal, and even opportunities for transcendence. Walter’s friend Gerald of Wales was also, when he wanted to be, an accomplished satirist.217 Gerald’s Gemma ecclesiastica bristles with anecdotes designed to r­ idicule the clergy, carrying a professed aim of encouraging reform.218 Undeniably Gerald also saw the advantages of articulating searing criticisms through the vehicle of satire. Characteristic of his texts are many small comic vignettes, designed to ignite outrage with their grotesque distortions. One of Gerald’s tales, for example, described a priest who asked his bishop to help him, as he didn’t have enough 211  Walter Map, De nugis, 4:2, pp. 286–7. 212  Walter Map, De nugis, 4:6, pp. 320–1. 213  De nugis survives in only one manuscript. See Brooke and Mynors, “Introduction,” in De nugis, pp. xxiv–xxxii. 214 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, edited and translated by S. E. Banks and J. W. Benns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 15. 215  Egbert Türk briefly discusses how Walter Map drew on Horace’s ridentem dicere verum in crafting a unique critique of those aspects of his life at court he found detestable, with an eye to “cherchait à améliorer”. Egbert Türk, Nugae curialium: Le règne d’Henri II Plantagenêt (1145–1189) et l’ethique politique (Genève: Libraire Droz, 1977), p. 177. 216  For an alternative view, see Monica Otter, who argues that “God and, by extension, transcendent sources of meaning are inaccessible” for Walter. Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 116. 217  On Gerald’s use of laughter and humor, see Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt and William Kynan-Wilson, “Smiling, Laughing and Joking in Papal Rome: Thomas of Marlborough and Gerald of Wales at the Court of Innocent III (1198-1216),” Papers of the British School at Rome (2018), pp. 1–29; and Peter  J.  A.  Jones, “Gerald of Wales’ Sense of Humour,” in Gerald of Wales: New Perspectives on a Medieval Writer and Critic, edited by Georgia Henley and A. Joseph McMullen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), pp. 147–64. 218  Gerald of Wales, Opera 2, Gemma ecclesiastica. See especially ch. 22. On Gerald’s satirical aims at reform, see Opera 2, preface, p. lxv.

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118  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century livestock to sustain him. Harshly, the bishop said that not only would he not help, but that from now on every time the priest complained about his situation, he would have to pay him a tithe of ten pigs.219 Gerald saw these humorous exaggerations as contributing to a noble moral cause. When he was attacked by the dignitaries of Hereford Cathedral for the bitterness of his invectives, he wrote a lofty defense that compared his own aims with those of the great satirists. “They should also condemn those who wrote satires,” he argued, “the defenders of worthy behavior and censors of the opposite” (sic et satiricos omnes, morum assertores laudabilium et contrariorum reprehensores . . .).220 In the same letter, Gerald further justified his invectives with the words of Terence, reminding his readers that “he who continues to say what he wishes, will hear what he does not wish.”221 It would be unfair to say that Gerald always, regardless of whether it was true or not, told people what they did not want to hear. Yet, as he wrote when glossing one of Walter Map’s jokes, he firmly believed that “sometimes truth can be elicited from falsity,” a principal that he undeniably adhered to when he artfully rendered his satiric humor.222 Although they took different approaches to satire, these four writers each saw an important revelatory potential in humor. Ultimately, we must understand this principle in the context of a social network where speaking was heavily policed and circumscribed. If we can believe John of Salisbury’s early observations in the late 1150s, people feared that unrestrained speech could lead to being accused of treason among Henry’s entourage. “If you trust me, you will restrain your tongue,” John warned, or else “you will be said to be a public enemy and to be guilty of lèse-majesté.”223 According to Peter of Blois’s letters in the 1180s, the court was stocked with flatterers quick to turn to rage and take revenge on anybody who insulted them.224 In this restrictive environment, satire and the oblique distortion of humor served as an alternative means of free expression. Just as many court jokes playfully aired criticisms or subtly negotiated hierarchies, by extension the great works of satire that came out of this group ultimately provided an arena for writers to say the unsayable. * * * Humor undoubtedly worked as a kind of nuanced political language at Henry II’s court. Whether jokes were helping to police curial identity, serving as weapons in

219  Gerald of Wales, Opera 3, De iure et statu Menevensis ecclesiae, 1, pp. 137–8. 220  Letter 2, in Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, pp. 162–3. 221  Letter 2, in Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, pp. 162–3. 222  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, Speculum Ecclesiae, 3: 14, p. 221: “. . . sic et veritas interdum poterit etiam a falsis elici.” 223  Entheticus Minor, A: 1, pp. 230–1. 224  Peter of Blois, Letters, PL, vol. 207, letter 150, col. 440c.

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Laughter and Power at Henry II ’ s Court  119 political debate, or airing delicate criticisms, they usually introduced a series of subtle judgments that gained power precisely from their vague and provisional nature. When courtiers joked or laughed at a figure in public disgrace, for instance, the gesture had a more vigorous impact than anything that could be said explicitly. Mockery could cling to a reputation like a fetid odor, as Peter of Blois identified in Hugh of Nonant’s humiliation of William Longchamp. Importantly, the effects and traces of a public joke could not be overturned by any simple apology, or even by any arduous act of penance or homage. This was because suffering mockery did not just affect a courtier’s status; it affected the entire perspective from which all aspects of their being, including status, came to be perceived. At the other end of the spectrum, the flip side of humor’s power came when it allowed alliances that would otherwise transcend formal status. When King Henry laughed with Hugh of Lincoln or when John Spang joked with Gerald of Wales, the humor enabled a kind of ambivalent relationship, a moment that could allow rejection and acceptance, or forgiveness and condemnation, to hang together at the same time. Throughout these diverse contexts, humor’s strategic force was above all its ability to participate in a shadow form of political expression. Highlighting contradictions and expressing subtle or tacit judgments, court joking typically appealed to a politics more nuanced than any carefully written dictate could allow. Another important convergence was the belief that humor could connect courtiers with a higher moral authority. Many writers suggested a moral polarity in the humor they observed going on around them. John of Salisbury imagined joking as being either orderly or anarchic, while Daniel Beccles polarized it as either refined or foolish, and Gerald of Wales classified jokes as either those that revealed or those that obscured truth. In each case, these claims justified all kinds of political joking. Occasionally, we have seen how the higher moral ambitions of satirical laughter and diplomatic jokes were used to actively authorize cruel ridicule. The bitter invectives of Arnulf of Lisieux or Gerald of Wales are a case in point. In both texts, the writers praised humor as a way of illuminating truth, before bending this perspective to legitimate the ruthless mockery of their rivals. Underlying this kind of move was the wider belief that laughter, so long as it was of the right kind, often stood firmly on the side truth and of justice. Essentially, the intense preoccupation with humor at Henry’s court may be understood as a function of social and political tension. As a form of irreducible charismatic power, humor starkly countered some of the new processes of order and codification that were coming to define Henry’s regime. At the precise moment when written rules and laws were becoming far more prolific and important, when textbooks were coming to dominate as modes of communicating ideas and judgments, and when courtiers were beginning to be valued more for their literacy and administration than their military prowess or aristocratic blood, laughter offered an attractive set of alternative principles. By defying

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120  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century “rule, order, and measure,” as John of Salisbury wrote, joking and frivolity appealed to a proxy, perhaps more immediate sense than the one imposed by explicit language and law.225 From this angle, the satirical theories of John of Salisbury or Walter Map appear as methodologies for dealing with the restrictions of daily court life. Whether mocking a friend, exposing a rival’s political weakness, or showing an equivocal assent in a diplomatic meeting, the adept court joker momentarily short-circuited explicit forms of judgment, appealing to a code of power made attractive by being implicit. But what ultimately allowed these different strategies of humor to become so effective was the building of a court environment in which the immediate judgment of the monarch and his close associates acted as the primary gateways to political success. It was a quirk of Henry II’s peculiar style of leadership, as we will see in more depth in Chapter  5 below, that he encouraged, shaped, and maintained these values of humor among his entourage. This can be seen as a wellspring, one that if it did not actively produce court humor in itself, certainly allowed it to flourish and thrive. Yet as we have seen, Henry’s court was a unique social world. It operated with a political language of its own, with courtiers effectively fusing the growing conceptual and imagined power of laughter into a hard-edged, socially coercive practice. As we will see in the next two chapters, this moral language of humor became a particularly powerful tool in the writing of the hagiographies and cult of Thomas Becket, as well as in the chronicles and narratives of Henry II himself.

225  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, 1: 25, l.331–2, pp. 126–7. “ . . . contra nugifluis lex, modus, ordo perit.”

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4

Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint Our glorious martyr, who, just as he once stood out as urbane in worldly matters, now is found witty in his miracles . . . John of Poitiers, Letter to Odo of Canterbury, Becket Materials, vol. 1, p. 373 We have seen how laughter acquired a unique power in twelfth-century texts, and how writers within the social and political world of Henry II’s court came to value humor both for its destructive and its revelatory potential. A figure at the very intersection of these conditions was Thomas Becket (d.1170), who was uniquely celebrated by contemporaries as a type of “laughing saint.” In his transformation from chancellor to archbishop and finally to saint, and through both his life and afterlife, Saint Thomas was associated with first frivolous, then derisive, and finally holy laughter. The task of this chapter is to explain how these different aspects fitted together, revealing in the process the surprisingly central role of laughter in the construction of Becket’s sanctity. Thomas’s laughter deserves in modern scholarship something of the sustained recognition it received from contemporaries. As we have already glimpsed in other chapters, Thomas’s frivolity caused anxiety among his allies and enemies alike, and eventually arose as a critical issue that divided his biographers. After his death, Becket’s supporters and hagiographers made a great effort to emphasize the saint’s laughing and joking in their narratives. Through his prophetic visions, through images of his death, through his posthumous miraculous resurrections, and especially through the many “witty miracles” recorded in the vast collections made by Benedict of Peterborough (d.1194) and William of Canterbury (fl.c.1170s), Thomas’s laughter emerged again and again in the literature as a sign of his saintly virtue. This chapter is specifically concerned with the textual construction of Thomas’s sainthood. My primary focus is therefore on the small body of texts that built Thomas’s cult: the fifteen biographies and the two large miracle collections, all of which were written in the first two decades after Becket’s death. Throughout these different accounts, intriguingly, Thomas’s laughter nearly always appeared in decisive moments. Across many of the hagiographies, Becket’s frivolous youth is made to symbolize the weakness of his morals before he was transformed into an archbishop. In other accounts, Thomas is shown laughing or joking in the moments before he is about to be killed, or else at the point that he is predicting Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century. Peter Jones, Oxford University Press (2019). © Peter J. A. Jones. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001

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122  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century his own death. Perhaps most startlingly, Becket’s laughter appears throughout the miracle collections as a mark of a miraculous posthumous humor. As a marker of both his sin and redemption, it comes to appear as nothing less than an inspired sign of his transition from layman to saint. The significance of Thomas’s laughter reverberates beyond the history of medieval humor. First of all, it can offer new perspectives on the notorious issue of his “transformation.” One of the central mysteries of Becket’s career is that, upon his accession to the archbishopric in 1162, he seems to have changed his character completely. Having been the king’s flexible and unscrupulous companion while he served as Royal Chancellor, Thomas suddenly became a pious, principled, and intransigent champion of ecclesiastical rights. Ever since John of Salisbury wrote the first Becket biography in the year after the martyr’s death, this transformation of character has been a matter for debate and reconstruction. For one of Thomas’s modern-day biographers, Frank Barlow, Becket’s character shift from courtier to archbishop was that of a parvenu, a man overreaching in an attempt to live up to an office whose challenges lay beyond his capabilities.1 More recently Stefanie Jansen has argued that Thomas in fact underwent no great transformation in his life at all, and that the effect was rather a retrospective one, a retroactive operation of the hagiographies and accounts produced after 1170.2 Moderating these opposing views is Anne Duggan, who, while acknowledging how Thomas’s character changed in the 1160s, has drawn attention to the extent that his contemporaries also sought to craft and reshape his life, even while he was living. As she has pointed out, even the letters written immediately after Becket’s death reveal “the circumstantial reality” of Thomas’s life, as she puts it, “already passing into the universal image of the man.”3 Arguably, the very sublimation of Thomas’s courtly humor and laughter in the hagiographies and miracle collections suggests a further point of retroactive transformation. As it was recast as a holy virtue, we can ­witness Becket’s laughter becoming transfigured in the process of turning him into the emerging universal image of a “laughing saint.” But Becket’s laughter is also important as it contributed to the wider political theater at Henry II’s court. Scholars have long observed the centrality of theatrical gestures and ritual performances in the course of the Becket controversy. The anthropologist Victor Turner, a number of decades ago, chose to frame Thomas’s actions as components in an elaborate dramatic script.4 Timothy Reuter, with a more historical eye, has illustrated how Becket’s “staged” emotional responses were instrumental in constructing realities, for example by enacting and defining 1  Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). 2  Stefanie Jansen, Wo ist Thomas Becket? Der ermodete Heilige zwischen Erinnerung und Erzählung (Husum: Matthiesen, 2002). 3 Anne J. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London: Arnold, 2004), p. 227. 4 Victor Turner, “Religious Paradigms and Social Action: Thomas Becket at the Council of Northampton,” in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 60–96.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  123 his relationship with the king.5 Similarly Martin Aurell has described the Becket controversy as a complex semiotic system, seeing the gestures of the archbishop as ways of communicating vital symbolic meanings to contemporaries.6 More recently, Hugh Thomas has discussed the vivid political importance of the mockery of Ranulf de Broc, who sought to humiliate Becket by ritualistically cutting off the tail of his horse.7 Adding to these arguments, I wish to stress how Becket’s laughter and joking worked as charged signs, specifically in the texts that built up the image of his sanctity. Becket’s biographers, as I will suggest, were alive to the political resonance of showing an archbishop laughing defiantly in triumph over a king. In fact, part of the appeal of transfiguring Thomas’s laughter into a saintly hilarity was that it rendered this gesture of courtly theater into a powerful piece of political hagiography. Most importantly, I also wish to explore Becket’s saintly laughter as it related to the twelfth-century Christianization of laughter. As André Vauchez has recognized, bodily gestures were coming in this period to attain a heightened saintly significance.8 Although scholars have pointed to how saints such as Richard of Chichester were celebrated for their laughter in the 1200s, work remains to be done on how the image of laughing sanctity worked in the twelfth century.9 Through Becket, I hope to explore how the sort of laughter critical to the political theater of Henry’s court also became the territory of theological or hagiographical discourse. As it appears in the context of the findings we have so far made in this book, the miraculous and moral appropriation of Becket’s court humor was able to create a new paradigm of sanctity. Responding to the emergence of laughter in contemporary theological and exegetical discussions, the figure of Becket in the hagiographies both articulated and contributed to new conceptions of a laughing sanctity in twelfth-century England.

Becket’s Life and Transformation Thomas Becket was born in London around the year 1115, the son of a wealthy city merchant. After receiving a good education, he found his way in the 1130s to 5  Timothy Reuter, “Velle sibi fieri in forma hac: Symbolic Acts in the Becket Dispute,” in Timothy Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, edited by Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 167–90, at p. 177. 6 Martin Aurell, “Le Meurtre de Thomas Becket: Les Gestes d’un Martyre,” in Bischofsmord im  Mittelalter, Murder of Bishops, edited by N.  Fryde and D.  Reitz (Göttingen: Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 187–210, especially p. 191. 7  Hugh Thomas, “Shame, Masculinity, and the Death of Thomas Becket,” Speculum 87: 4 (October 2012): pp. 1050–88. 8 André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, translated by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially pp. 434–5. 9 Michael Goodich, Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1982), p. 83. Goodich recognizes how Richard of Chichester’s name, “Ricardus,” was imagined by his biographer as deriving from ridens, carus, and dulcis.

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124  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century the emerging university at Paris. This was the Paris of Peter Abelard, of Gilbert of Poitiers, and of John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, and here Thomas would have been exposed to the latest intellectual currents. Returning to London, he used his family connections to secure a job working in the household of Archbishop Theobald. Now surrounded by some of the sharpest intellects of his day, Thomas distinguished himself with his charm and eloquent diplomacy. Soon after Henry II succeeded to the English throne in 1154, the king met with Thomas, was impressed by him, and appointed him to be his new Royal Chancellor. Years of successful co-operation between secular and ecclesiastical power followed. But then, shortly after Theobald’s death in 1161, King Henry shocked the ecclesias­ tical world by making Thomas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the first non-monk to be appointed to the post. It was not long before this new configuration of power caused the two men to fall out. Thomas began battling the king over ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and vigorously argued for limits to be placed on royal power. Henry was furious at his apparent betrayal, and Thomas was forced to flee into exile in northern France in 1164. He eventually returned in 1170 after a brief peace was brokered, but relations chilled again, and on December 27th of that year the clash came to a chilling conclusion. Four knights burst into Canterbury Cathedral, demanded Thomas’s capitulation, and then brutally assassinated him, spilling his brains on the stone floor. A popular saint’s cult quickly sprang up at Canterbury, King Henry performed public penance, and within four years Thomas was canonized as a saint by Pope Alexander III. Throughout this mercurial lifetime, Thomas Becket acquired a checkered reputation for his wit and humor. Among his contemporaries, according to Gerald of Wales, Becket was well known as “a humorous man with a witty tongue” (vir iocularis et lingue dicacis).10 And the poet Robert Partes (d.c.1200), who certainly would have spent some time with Thomas at Reading Abbey, rhapsodized about the archbishop’s reputation for “matching anger with laughter” (furori risum).11 Many accounts of Thomas’s early frivolous behavior appear in the most detailed sources we have for the saint, the biographies produced in the decades after his death. Before moving to these texts, however, I want to consider the specific ways that Becket’s laughing and joking was perceived and written about  while he was still alive, before all aspects of his life had become re-crafted through the lenses of myth, martyrdom, and cult.12 A look, in particular, at letters from the period of Thomas’s exile in the 1160s reveals a notorious, occasionally biting humor. Intriguingly, this was a capacity that worried his contemporaries, some of whom were desperate to either reshape or reinterpret this aspect of his behavior as a virtue. 10  Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler (De Principis Instructione), edited and translated by Robert Bartlett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018), 1:18, pp. 276–7. 11  London, BL MS Egerton 2951, f.8r. Note, this poem has been transcribed in William H. Cornog, “The Poems of Robert Partes,” Speculum 12: 2 (1937): pp. 215–50. 12  This methodology is also employed in Stefanie Jansen, Wo ist Thomas Becket?

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  125 An examination of Becket’s correspondence gives a tantalizing but limited picture of his sense of humor. Despite the fact that many of Thomas’s letters may in fact have been drafted by his associates, and although most of them reveal few charismatic flourishes, these documents nevertheless represent an important public aspect of Thomas’s political persona.13 Through that persona, it emerges, he occasionally revealed flashes of wit, and particularly indulged in cutting, occasionally even spiteful, mockery. In a letter to John Planeta, Becket urged that he should tell his particular predicament “very privately to the Lord Pope and his friends,” adding sarcastically “if he has any.”14 After reading one of Thomas’s drafted letters to the cardinals William and Otto in 1167, John of Salisbury was so alarmed by Thomas’s mockery that he told him to strike out all of the passages of “biting sarcasm” (dentosis salibus).15 Among these barbs were flights of playful exaggeration, such as Thomas’s fawning hope that the cardinal William of Pavia should “succeed to the highest.”16 Although the formality of many of these letters may have stifled Thomas’s joking, a lighter, more humorous spirit at times also rose to the surface. In another exchange with William of Pavia, when Thomas was seething at the cardinal’s failure to support his position with the pope, he quipped that he should act fast, just like the physicians who rush to collect their fees while their patients are suffering.17 A far more detailed sense of Thomas’s humor emerges in stories circulated by his contemporaries. While he was in exile in the 1160s, a number of observers, both friends and enemies, often complained in letters about the nature and ill effects of Thomas’s jokes. His strongest critic, Gilbert Foliot (d.1187), castigated the archbishop, in his fiery invective of 1166, for his frivolous foolishness, and especially for what he took to be his vapid delight in courtly distractions (curie iocundis usibus).18 Even John of Salisbury, who at this point was playing the role of Thomas’s closest ally, privately revealed to other confidantes that he felt Becket’s joking was a weakness that needed to be redirected. At various moments, John attempted to explain away Thomas’s misguided humor as an insignificance. “While he was a great joker at court” (magnificus erat nugator in curia), he reassured

13  On the production and authorship of Becket’s letters, see Anne  J.  Duggan, “Authorship and Authenticity in the Becket Correspondence,” in Vom Nutzen des Edierens, edited by Brigitte Merta, Andrea Sommerlechner, and Herwig Wigl (Vienna: Verlag, 2005), pp. 25–44. On the manuscripts of the letter collection, see Anne  J.  Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History of His Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 14  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 97, p. 449. 15  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 138, pp. 638–9. 16  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 133, pp. 624–5. 17  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 142, p. 657. This is, as Duggan records, a medical joke that can be found in the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, also quoted by John of Salisbury in Policraticus, sive de nugis curialium et vestigis philosophorum, edited by Clement C. J. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), vol. 1, 2: 29, p. 168. 18  Gilbert Foliot, The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, edited by Adrian Morey and Christopher N. L. Brooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 170 [“Multiplicem Nobis”], p. 238.

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126  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Baldwin of Totnes at the point that Becket’s reputation was growing more ­divisive, “he was nevertheless considered by all to be worthy of the high ecclesiastical office he received.”19 Yet John was highly sensitive to how humor still had the power to sway Thomas from a reasonable course. In a personal letter he sent to William Brito in early 1168, John complained that Becket was sometimes led into bad ­habits by certain “jokers” among his entourage (quorumdam nugatorum), who he said “poured poison in the archbishop's ears” and succeeded in “turning his mind” (auribus ejus possint venena suae . . . instillare).20 Evidently, Thomas’s humor caused his contemporaries some degree of anxiety. Yet it is a decisive mark of the changing attitudes to laughter in the period that, instead of urging him to stop all of this joking, his confidantes mostly urged him to redirect his humor towards virtue. From the very first, John of Salisbury had aimed to persuade Becket that his joking could have a revelatory use; a faculty, as we saw in the third chapter, that was considered highly refined among this circle of courtiers. We have already seen how John’s Policraticus, which he sent to Becket in 1159, warned Thomas personally that he should try to shape all his leisure as labor, and that he should remain thoughtfully detached in the face of others’ jokes (philosopharis in nugis alienis).21 Whether or not he meant implicitly to criticize Thomas, the instructive effect was still the same.22 Meanwhile in the Entheticus, another book dedicated to Thomas in the very same year, John constructed an elaborate image of a royal court in which well-intentioned humor was praised rather than condemned. Tricks and jokes, he suggested in a passage that was surely written with Thomas in mind, could be a mark of good behavior so long as they yielded some use or profit (ille dolus bonus est, qui proficit utilitati).23 Friends of Becket constructed an important pair of oppositions, distinguishing between mocking ridicule, which they associated with the royal court, and stoic good cheer, which they aspired to embody themselves. Beneath their words of advice, we can often detect anxieties that Thomas was prone to the former rather than the latter. A clerk named Hervey, a member of Thomas’s close intellectual circle (eruditi), sent Thomas a very personal letter during the fraught summer of 1164.24 In it, he argued that the archbishop should look to build a serene emotional and mental equilibrium. According to Hervey, Becket needed to recast all

19 John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury, edited by W.  J.  Millor, H.  E.  Butler, and Christopher  N.  L.  Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), vol. 2, Letter 187. Here I have adapted Brooke’s translation. 20  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, 245, pp. 488–91. 21  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, vol. 1, Book 2, prologue, p. 65. 22 John’s criticism of Thomas is emphasized in Cary  J.  Nederman and Karen Bollerman, “ ‘The Extravagance of the Senses’: Epicureanism, Priestly Tyranny, and the Becket Problem in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, Third Series 8 (2011), pp. 1–25p. 23  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Maior and Minor, edited and translated by Jan van Laarhoven (Leiden: Brill, 1987), vol. 1, Entheticus Maior, pp. 198–9. 24  Hervey is featured in Herbert of Bosham’s list of Thomas’s eruditi: Becket Materials, vol. 3, p. 527.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  127 aspects of his character in order to maintain his strength against the king’s assaults, and this included substituting his lowly joking and mockery for a gentle wit and a more moral laughter. Hervey’s letter began by outlining an ideal of a divine laughter, toward which he urged Thomas to aspire. “It is the right and ­privilege of a mother's love to change her sons’ tears into laughter (fletus convertat in risum),” he wrote, “by embracing more warmly those whose tears she finds more pleasing.”25 Adopting an apocalyptic tone, Hervey then insisted that Thomas was about to face severe persecution, and that only by maintaining a cheerful face could he retain his inner security of spirit. The supreme Father, the destroyer of the worthless tree, can be seen, rising on high: he will bring in his own laborers to tear up this kind of plantation from the roots, nor will he leave its creator unpunished. The Lord of Hosts will do these things: blessed are they that put their faith in him, when shortly he unleashes his anger. Therefore, let your face shine forth confidently with delight [Confidenter igitur hilarescat facies tua], nor let any particle of confusion remain in your innermost self.26

All of this was placed in contrast with Becket’s previous life, which Hervey glossed as one of arrogance (insolens), self-exaltation (exaltatio), and empty charm (blandita). Picking him up on how he had previously “ridiculed” words of advice, he warned him that these habits of dismissive mockery should be eradicated and overcome. Finally, if you aspire to well-ordered prosperity, you must bear with equanimity whatever happens in Fortune’s play-ground. A carefully read page can be of ­benefit if it is not ridiculed; even if untimely, its words have come from true faith, and should not offend the intelligence of a wise man, even though a dog might bark them down.27

Hervey’s image of Becket suggests a man fully immersed in a world where ridicule had replaced reasoned engagement. At this point in the conflict with the king, as he saw it, “barbs” (aculeis) had been placed around Thomas on all sides, and “misfortune” was teaching him “the inner strength” of his own heart.28 Ultimately for Hervey, the lesson was that this ridicule and mockery should be borne stoically and redirected to a more moral cheerfulness. On no account should Thomas relapse into his previous ways of mocking laughter and ridicule. Only through a steely temperance of the mind would he be able to substitute a higher laughter and joy of spiritual triumph for his previous frivolities. Thomas’s task, in essence, was therefore not to eliminate his humor, but rather to transform and sublimate it.

25  Becket Correspondence, Letter 36, vol. 1, pp. 136–7. 26  Becket Correspondence, Letter 36, vol. 1, pp. 138–41. 27  Becket Correspondence, Letter 36, vol. 1, pp. 142–3. 28  Becket Correspondence, Letter 36, vol. 1, pp. 138–9.

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128  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Ultimately, we can see that, after all, Thomas did have a reputation for laughter in his lifetime. But, from the moral perspective of ecclesiastical critics, it was a laughter of entirely the wrong kind. Specifically, he was known for a frivolous, occasionally cutting wit, a characteristic that caused a degree of concern and ­controversy. Significantly, the attempts made by John of Salisbury and the clerk Hervey to reshape this humor as a virtue can be said to reflect an effort at transforming Becket’s piety during his lifetime. After Becket’s martyrdom, these efforts only increased in their intensity and their artifice. While his spiritual reputation was being elevated through a series of elaborate hagiographies and miracle collections to that of sainthood, however, a number of his contemporaries nevertheless chose to retain and recast his reputation for humor. With great narrative ingenuity, as we will now see, they found a way to repackage it as a mark of his saintly virtue.

Saint Thomas’s Afterlife Following Thomas’s martyrdom in December 1170, Canterbury became the center of production for an entire industry of hagiographical literature, celebrating Thomas’s holy achievements and making the case for his canonization, which was formalized in 1173. Fifteen biographies were written in the two decades after his death, in which Thomas’s life was effectively shaped and rewritten as one of an exemplary saint and martyr. A crucial aspect of this construction, although his­ torians have rarely drawn attention to the matter, was Becket’s laughter and humor. Nearly all of the biographers agreed that Thomas had been renowned for his wit in his youth and had enjoyed a rather wayward sense of humor while he had been serving as Royal Chancellor. However, the merit of this jocularity divided the biographers. Although all of them filtered it through a narrative of glorious martyrdom, some chose to explain it away as a superficial pretense, while others, conversely, sought to make humor one of the saint’s key moral virtues. In either case, these writers were largely united in conceiving of Thomas’s laughter as one of the defining aspects of his transformation from courtier to cleric. Hagiographies were not the only way of promoting a saint and his cult. Throughout the 1170s, Thomas’s cause was also advanced by two vast miracle collections, compiled by the Canterbury monks, William of Canterbury, and Benedict of Peterborough. In these collections, which were unprecedented in their size and scale, laughter achieved perhaps an even more prominent place in the construction of Becket’s sanctity. Dozens of miracles described the saint miraculously joking or else causing laughter, while an entire subsection of “witty miracles” celebrated how Thomas played elaborate tricks and practical jokes from beyond the grave, miracles that reportedly made people laugh in “glory of the martyr” (martyris gloriam).29 Why, across this body of literature, was there such a 29  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 2: 50, p. 96.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  129 preoccupation with Thomas’s humor? And how, exactly, did his contemporaries manage to justify spinning Thomas’s laughter as a virtue of his sainthood? Originating in the very first of the Becket hagiographies was the idea that Thomas’s frivolous laughter and joking had always been a courtly performance, an act that masked an intense and serious inner piety underneath. John of Salisbury, who composed his vita of Thomas in 1171, was the first to articulate this theme.30 While he said that Thomas had initially immersed himself in both serious and frivolous things (in seriis earum et nugis) at the royal court, John maintained that throughout this period Thomas had dissimulated his true feelings.31 Although he may have appeared “happy in face” (in facie laeta), he argued, underneath Becket remained “weary in heart” (corde contritus).32 Those who have studied the relationship between the two men closely have suggested that John was often acutely frustrated by Becket’s erratic actions while he was alive.33 Yet this seems to have changed when he died. If John had failed in his own letter writing to convince Thomas to redirect his humor in his lifetime, he was now determined to claim that, as a saint, Thomas had never genuinely joked at all. The essence of John’s analysis was soon borrowed and developed by the author of the Anonymous II (written c.1172–3), one of the very next biographies.34 As this account claimed, Thomas had “joked and was cheerful with others” (inter eos jocundus et hilaris) as a courtier, “while inside he disagreed with himself ” (intus tamen dissidere curabat).35 In the same interpretative camp was William FitzStephen, whose Vita (written c.1173–4) glossed Thomas’s laughter as a surface illusion. While conceding that Becket had used a ready wit (facetus adoptabat) throughout his youth, Fitzstephen felt it important to explain away Thomas’s frivolities as a pretense.36 Whatever Thomas’s actions at the royal court, FitzStephen insisted, there was always evidence of his true “humility in his eyes” (humilis erat in oculis suis).37 While the chancellor may have played often, he said, he only did so in a perfunctory way and “never gave up his devotion to good works” (ludebat plerumque, sed perfunctorie, non dedita opera).38 This dualistic explanation of Thomas’s sense of humor was given a poetic depth by Garnier de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, a traveling French writer who composed an 30  This issue is addressed in C. Stephen Jaeger, “Irony and Role-Playing in John of Salisbury and the Becket Circle,” in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224): Actes du Colloque tenu à Poitiers du 2 au 5 mai 2002, edited by Martin Aurell (Poitiers: Civilisation Médiévale, 2003), pp. 319–31. 31  Becket Materials, vol. 2, JoS, Vita, 3, p. 303. 32  Becket Materials, vol. 2, JoS, Vita, 11, p. 308. 33 Karen Bollerman and Cary  K.  Nederman, “John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket,” in A Companion to John of Salisbury, edited by Christophe Grellard and Frédérique Lachaud (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 63–104. 34  For a discussion of the hagiographies, and an analysis of their dates of authorship, see Michael Staunton, Thomas Becket and His Biographers (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 1–18. 35  Becket Materials, vol. 4, Anonymous II, Vita, 9, p. 89. 36  Becket Materials, vol. 3, William FitzStephen, Vita, 12, p. 23. 37  Becket Materials, vol. 3, William FitzStephen, Vita, 12, p. 22. 38  Becket Materials, vol. 3, William FitzStephen, Vita, 10, p. 20.

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130  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Anglo-Norman verse life of Thomas after arriving in Canterbury in 1172.39 According to Garnier, all of Thomas’s profane behavior was feigned. Instead, he located the “real” Saint Thomas as dwelling in a hidden “inmost self.” Uniquely, Garnier said that Becket’s doubleness was something that became articulated in his moments of laughter. In a typical episode, the poet showed Thomas laughing at a prophecy. A monk had had a vision of God, who had told him to tell Thomas that he must begin wearing a monastic habit. Publicly reacting, “the archbishop gave a laugh when he heard this” (Quant l’arceveske l’ot, un ris li ad jete).40 But, as the poet was keen to explain, this laughing response was a deliberate display of sang-froid, one that the archbishop fiercely contradicted in private. When Thomas was alone, Garnier said, he really took the prophecy in earnest, and prayed sincerely for forgiveness from God for having laughed inappropriately. “Only to God did he open his whole heart,” he wrote, “for he was now utterly transformed from his previous self (car tut ert ja changié de tel cum ot esté).”41 In Garnier’s hands, Becket’s humor was therefore negated as a mere outward show. As he evocatively put it elsewhere, the archbishop was “a lamb inwardly, but outwardly a leopard.”42 Other biographers negated Thomas’s humor in a different way, choosing to insist that upon his transformation from courtier to archbishop in 1162 he had laid aside all traces of his past frivolity altogether. For the writer of the Anonymous II, this was spun as a tale of two emotions. While Thomas had striven to be “considered the first among the wits” (inter urbaniores etiam primus haberi semper ensius est) while a courtier,43 when he took on the serious task of becoming an archbishop he chose to “embrace tears instead” (uberibus lacrymis agens).44 A close look at the Vita written between 1173–4 by William of Canterbury, a monk of Christ Church who had received his orders from Becket himself, reveals this process of negation to the fullest. William admitted that Thomas had been full of jocund conversation in his youth (sermone jucundus) and explained that this was a tendency that had flourished at the royal court. While serving the king, he said, Thomas indulged in frequent trifling (nugis), excessive witticisms (facetias amplecti), and ultimately succumbed to the allure of frivolity (lenociniis mundi blandientis).45 Yet, by William’s reckoning, Thomas managed to transform himself drastically after he took the archiepiscopal pallium from the pope. From that moment, William said, he “neglected his previous life as a courtier” (se curialis 39  On Garnier, see Staunton, Thomas Becket, pp. 32–7. 40  La vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr par Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, edited by E.  Walberg (Lund: Gleerup, 1922), p. 21. English version in Garnier’s Becket: The Twelfth-Century Vie Saint Thomas Le Martyr de Cantorbire by Garnier de Pont St Maxence, translated by Janet Shirley (London: Phillimore and Co., 1975), p. 15. 41  La vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr, p. 21. English in Garnier’s Becket, p. 15. 42  Garnier’s Becket, p. 10. 43  Becket Materials, vol. 4, Anonymous II, pp. 82–3. 44  Becket Materials, vol. 4, Anonymous II, p. 88. 45  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Vita, 4, p. 5.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  131 antea neglexerit), and “became another man” (transformatus in virum alterum).46 Central to this transformation for the hagiographer was the sublimation of Thomas’s laughter. He stressed that ultimately Thomas came to take all his delight instead from an interior sense of devotion, “rejoicing because he deceived the world and concealed his true austerity in solidarity with his Canterbury brothers” (gaudens quia exteriori mundum falleret, interiori fratribus suis se conformaret).47 Not all of the biographers rejected or negated Thomas’s reputation for humor, however. Working with more radical agendas, a number of them chose instead to recast Thomas’s notorious humor as a saintly virtue. Not only was his laughter imagined as a mark of wisdom and foresight for these writers, but it also came to represent a particularly powerful type of mystical presence. The brief biography written by Edward Grim (c.1171–2) described Thomas as having “a certain jocularity of manner” (morum quaedam jocunditas), which he said expressed a kind of gravitas.48 Thomas’s jokes, he implied, were gateways to understanding, and he claimed that the saint “never said anything contrary to the truth, whether in joking or seriousness.”49 More directly, a number of biographers retrospectively gave Thomas’s laughter an explicitly mystical dimension. Becket’s closest associate throughout his exile, Herbert of Bosham, subtly constructed an image of Thomas in his Vita (c.1184–6) as a laughing prophet.50 Describing Becket’s forbearance, Herbert compared him to Isaiah. He was “just like the prophet,” Herbert said, as he “was ‘never saddened or troubled,’ but remained always cheerful, always delightful, delightful in the mind and in the face, delightful equally in all things” (semper hilaris, semper jocundus, jocundus mente, jocundus facie, jocundus semper et aequalis).51 Throughout his narrative, Herbert particularly emphasized the saint’s good humor in the face of adversity. At one point he described how Thomas smiled prophetically (tunc indutus subrideno) when he was told by King Henry that he would become Archbishop of Canterbury. Apparently, Thomas answered providentially: I know for sure that if, by God's design, this was made so, you would very quickly turn your mind and grace away from me. How things are now between us would be turned into atrocious hate.”52

As both the hagiographer and the reader would have known, this prediction would come true and Thomas’s smile was a sign of the prophecy. Just as in the tales of other prophets known to Henry’s court, such as Merlin and Edward the 46  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Vita, 9, p. 10. 47  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Vita, 9, p. 10. 48  Becket Materials, vol. 2, Edward Grim, Vita, p. 361. Edward Grim died c.1184. On what is known of his life and vita, see Staunton, Thomas Becket and His Biographers, pp. 28–37. 49  Becket Materials, vol. 2, Edward Grim, Vita, p. 360 n. 50  On Herbert’s vita, see Staunton, Thomas Becket, pp. 63–74. 51  Becket Materials, vol. 3, HoB, Vita, 4: 13, p. 374. Herbert’s quotation is from Isaiah 42. 52  Becket Materials, vol. 3, HoB, Vita, 2: 1, p. 181.

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132  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Confessor, Thomas’s enigmatic jocundity was here mobilized by Herbert of Bosham as a sure sign of his divine revelation.53 A number of biographers also described Thomas as laughing in his final days, especially at moments when he was contemplating his impending death. The Canterbury monk Alan of Tewkesbury included in his Vita (written c.1176) a scene of Thomas’s “last supper” with his companions. According to Alan, the archbishop laughed and joked as his friends brought up the possibility that he might be murdered. While his entourage agonized, Becket “laughed lightly” (moderato risu), replying “it is me alone who is under attack.”54 Again, this scene brings to mind Aelred of Rievaulx’s life of Edward the Confessor. By suggesting that Becket met these prophecies with a laugh Alan was exercising a conscious design, connecting Becket’s laughter with his acceptance of martyrdom. A contrasting, far more realistic episode occurred in the Icelandic translation of Robert of Cricklade’s lost Vita (written c.1173–4), the Thómas Saga Erkibyskups. When he heard predictions of his death, Thomas was instead described here as weeping uncontrollably. This was obviously a fact that the writer felt a little uncomfortable in recording. But, as he explained, it was a sign that “the body fears, while the inner man feels no pain.”55 It is a testament to the power of Alan’s laughing image, however, that it found a more popular purchase among later writers. His prophetic scene was later copied verbatim by the Quadrilogus II (written c.1198–9),56 and was also echoed in the work of Gerald of Wales (c.1220). Particularly touched by the image of laughing defiance, Gerald changed most of the details of Alan’s story, yet kept the details of the laugh the same. According to Gerald, while Thomas sat at dinner with his anxious entourage he gave a little laugh (modica . . . risus), and explained his humor with a flourish. “It is fitting,” he said, “for a man who is about to meet his Lord to be happy.”57 In the same tradition, a number of hagiographers chose to depict Thomas smiling as he met his end in Canterbury Cathedral. According to William of Canterbury, Becket approached his death with a “certain cheer” (quandam hilaritatem) and fell dying while wearing a “smiling and thankful face” (hilaritas et gra­ tia vultus).58 The stoic claims for Thomas as a man who maintained a steely inner strength through adversity here found a natural symbol in his apparent emotional control. Similarly, for the anonymous author of the verse Vita beati Thome martiris Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis in a manuscript from the British Library (c.1180–1200), Thomas was shown dying in a “most happy” state (cessit vita quidem, sed feliccisimus idem).59 Ultimately, Becket’s final moments were made to chime with a wider 53  See the discussion of laughing prophecy in Chapter 2, above. 54  Becket Materials, vol. 2, Alan of Tewkesbury, Vita, 34, p. 349. 55  Thómas Saga Erkibyskup, edited and translated by Eiríkr Magnússon, 2 vols. (London: Rolls Series, 1875), vol. 1, pp. 520–1. 56  Becket Materials, vol. 4, Quadrilogus, 2: 27, pp. 363–4 57  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, 27, pp. 52–3. 58  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Vita, 40, pp. 135–6. 59  London, BL MS Cotton Julius D. III, f.190r.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  133 twelfth-century tradition, one that imagined good Christians, and especially good martyrs, as going off to meet their deaths in a state of euphoric joy.60 Thomas appears as more of a “smiling saint” than a “laughing saint” in these descriptions, and it is curious that the biographers avoided describing him laughing at the moment of martyrdom itself. But an explosive exception was the poet Garnier, who suggested the image, albeit indirectly, in a unique and elaborate vision that he attributed to Thomas in the run up to his death. While he was on his way back to Canterbury, Garnier said, Becket had had a dream in which he was attacked by Henry II’s men. In the dream, Thomas’s head was cut off and skinned to the skull by order of the king. Miraculously, however, Becket remained unhurt and felt no pain while he was being tortured. Instead, “he laughed, which made the king furious” (E pur ço qu’il s’en rist, fu li reis en irur).61 Artfully, Garnier’s dream vision managed to connect the sublime image of Thomas’s saintly detachment with a political statement of his ultimate triumph over Henry. Much as the clerk Hervey had suggested in his 1164 letter of advice, Becket’s laughing severed head was an exemplary (if extreme) metaphor of how the model archbishop could maintain a serene comportment in the face of the king’s anger. Politically, this laughing defiance also evoked a supreme indestructability, something that an ecclesiastical power currently being besieged by royal attack sorely needed to feel. Alongside the hagiographies, the other major component of Becket’s saint cult was the two enormous collections of Thomas’s miracle stories, compiled at Canterbury in the immediate aftermath of his death. These exceptionally popular volumes, recorded by two Christ Church monks, Benedict of Peterborough (between 1171 and 1173) and William of Canterbury (between 1172 and 1177), comprised over 400 stories of Thomas’s posthumous miracles.62 As recent work on the collections has illustrated, the compilers actively sought to construct a pol­ itical message out of these testaments to Becket’s sanctity. For instance, both Marcus Bull and Gesine Oppitz-Trotman have shown how Benedict and William’s miracles effectively articulated a series of criticisms against the king’s guilt and his 60 For twelfth-century discussions of smiling at the point of death, see for example Odo of Morsburg’s De moribus ecclesie, a handbook of good habits for clerics, which briefly mentioned that martyrs ought to be compelled to their deaths by a saintly lightheartedness (trahitur . . . hylarem): Montpellier, Bibliothèque de Médicine MS H 539, f.249v. Elsewhere, the De origine mortis humane, a twelfth-century book of guidelines for cultivating a “good death,” which described how those among the Christian elect would, at the moment of their deaths, be filled with joy in “eternal contemplation of goodness” (hilarescunt eternorum contemplatione bonorum): Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.16.17, f.72r. Of course, this motif also relates to the risus mysticus, described in Chapter 2, above. 61  La vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr, p. 130. English in Garnier’s Becket, translated by Shirley, pp. 102–3. 62  On the two collections, see Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 139–200, and the useful appendices, pp. 211–24; Nicholas Vincent, “William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough: The Manuscripts, Date and Context of the Becket Miracle Collections,” in Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident, edited by Edina Bozoky (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 347–88; and Didier Lett, “Deux Hagiographies, un saint et un roi: Conformisme et créativité dans les deux receuils de Miracula de Thomas Becket,” in Auctor et Auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médieevale, edited by M. Zimmermann (Paris: École des Chartes, 2001), pp. 201–16.

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134  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century need to make penance.63 Keeping these conscious efforts in mind, it is striking to note that throughout these volumes it is above all Thomas’s laughter that emerges, again and again, as a particularly charged sign of his saintly power.64 By appropriating and reorienting the saint’s lifetime reputation for humor, it seems, these popular miracles developed another supporting pillar of Becket’s image as a ­divinely laughing saint. First of all, both of these collections played with the powerful idea that Thomas’s miracles were able to transform misery into joyful laughter.65 Many of William of Canterbury’s tales, for instance, stressed how Thomas’s interventions caused people to erupt laughing. In one story, a Welsh knight named Ranulf discovered his child had died, and in tears prayed for Thomas’s help. When the saint intervened and revived the boy, however, William made a point of emphasizing how Becket had overturned the man’s emotions. “His grief,” he said, “was turned to laughter” (versus est luctus ejus in risum).66 Likewise, William described how the saint changed Ralph of Oxford’s tears into laughter when he revived his son from a crippling illness (martyr beneficii sui risum differebat).67 Tellingly, William often added these images of transformative laughter almost gratuitously, placing them as glosses at the beginning or end of an anecdote. After he described how Thomas had cured one girl of a falling sickness, he described the process as one of “leading her through shipwreck into the port of jocund tranquility” (in portum jocundae tranquiltatis).68 And, when a pilgrim found that some money he had lost had been returned to him by the martyr, William again said that the man’s “grief was, therefore, changed into laughter” (convertens igitur luctum suum in risum).69 Among the more dazzling of these miracles were Thomas’s laughing resurrections. Both miracle collections described how Thomas caused people to laugh as he brought them back from the dead. In a story from Benedict of Peterborough’s collection, a little boy named Geoffrey was revived after he was crushed by a falling wall in Winchester. The people of the town cried, “invoked the name of God and the martyr,” and frantically dug through the rubble. Although Geoffrey’s cradle had been utterly destroyed, they were amazed to find that the boy was “not only unhurt, but laughing” (non solum illaesum sed et ridentem) under the debris.70 63 For example Marcus Bull, “Criticism of Henry II’s expedition to Ireland in William of Canterbury’s Miracles of St Thomas Becket,” Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007): pp. 107–29; and Gesine Oppitz-Trotman, “Penance, Mercy and Saintly Authority in the Miracles of St Thomas Becket,” in Saints and Sanctity, edited by Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge: Ecclesiastical History Society, 2011), pp. 136–47. 64 Rachel Koopmans decisively argues for the compilers’ artifice and careful selection in her Wonderful to Relate, pp. 159–80, and pp. 181–200. 65 Benedict’s collection instead emphasized how Thomas’s miracles brought their recipients joy (gaudium). See for example Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 1: 6, p. 34; 4: 80, p. 248; 4: 94, p. 257. 66  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 2: 48, p. 209. 67  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 6: 90, p. 484. 68  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 2: 10, p. 167. 69  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 6: 155, p. 535. 70  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 4: 88, pp. 252–3.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  135 This story clearly touched William of Canterbury, as it was one of the few that he borrowed directly from Benedict’s collection.71 Moreover, William included it alongside a further miracle, one in which a boy was revived with a smiling (arridentem) face.72 In fact, this motif of jocular revival formed part of a broader pattern in the collections. When a little boy with diarrhea was saved from near death, he was described as “full of delight” (levitate), and Benedict wrote that the saint’s intervention had caused the boy to begin “twirling around and playing” (rotans et ludens).73 Likewise, Benedict detailed how the saint prepared a knight for a good death by making him “more cheerful” (hilarior) than he had ever been before while he lay dying.74 Just as the image of Becket depicted in the biograph­ ies was often of a man who had faced death with a laugh and a joke, here, in his miracles, he was pictured granting to those who prayed to him a spirit of playful defiance against the threat of death in their own lives. These moments of inspired play were amplified by contrasts with deadly laughter, especially in an array of stories where the saint punished spiteful mockery. Of the two compilers, William of Canterbury was particularly preoccupied with this theme. In a declaratory and personal introduction to one of his stories, a miracle in which the saint revived a little girl who had fallen while foolishly playing on a wall, William announced that “games give rise to grief ” (ludus luctum parit). As he explained, “laughter and lightheartedness, while sometimes acceptable, often carry bitterness” (Risum et hilaritatem quandoque promittit, sed saepius amaritudinem ingerit).75 This concern translated vividly into William’s miracles, where the saint was often shown taking revenge on people for laughing at his miraculous power. One monk laughed when he heard that Thomas had been canonized, and was promptly punished by having his tongue silenced.76 The reluctant pilgrim Hugh Ridel, in another story, was choked nearly to death by the saint for lightheartedly mocking the idea of visiting his shrine at Canterbury.77 Equally, Benedict of Peterborough described how those who mocked (in subsannationem et derisum) the power of the Canterbury Water were punished by finding their liquid turned to lead or tin.78 More harshly, Benedict also described how a woman from Leicestershire had been struck blind by the saint after she had laughed at the idea of going on pilgrimage to Canterbury (in risum soluta). This was a very particular response, Benedict emphasized, one that was triggered at the precise point of the woman’s laughter.79 Of course, knowing the motif of risus blasphemus that 71  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC Miracula, 2: 45, pp. 206–7. 72  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC Miracula, 2: 48, p. 209. 73  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 4: 96, p. 258. 74  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC Miracula, 2: 65, pp. 109–10. 75  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 6: 32, p. 443. 76  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, p. 148. 77  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 4: 15, p. 327. 78  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 3: 22, p. 134. 79  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 4: 33, p. 206. “[C]umque risu multo dissolveretur, quasi cineribus clibani urentibus oculos proprios sensit respergi.” Note, however, that in another tale Thomas

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136  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century we saw earlier on, we will not be surprised to hear any of these tales, or to see again the playing out of this structure of laughter and punishment. Yet, as the miracles suggest, it was a very specific ethics of laughter that especially concerned Saint Thomas. Most of all, Thomas’s courtly wit was celebrated and transfigured through what Benedict of Peterborough called his “jucunditatis miracula,” or “amusing miracles.” Unlike other miracles in the collections, in which the saint’s miraculous acts were immediate and entirely welcome, these miracles typically involved Saint Thomas playing tricks on people from beyond the grave, or else surprising them with small wonders or misfortunes. These “amusing miracles” were clearly significant, as lengthy clusters of them appear in both collections. But for modern readers, it is difficult to see how some of these tricks could ever have provoked laughter. Admittedly, some of them were utterly trivial. In one woman’s dream, Saint Thomas miraculously revealed the hiding place of her lost cheese.80 Yet, as we are told repeatedly by Benedict and William, these “miracles” actually made people laugh. Often, as with the woman and her cheese, their laughter may have registered genuine surprise or astonishment. But what made so many of these miracles funny, it seems, was how they cruelly humiliated people who committed minor sins. One typical story showed Becket making a pyx of water boil and bubble over whenever it passed through the hands of a disobedient monk, theatrically shaming him for his wrongdoings in front of his fellow brothers. As Benedict explained, this was a feat “as laughable and amusing as it was marvelous” (tam joco et risui . . . quam admirationi).81 Equally, many of Saint Thomas’s acts of miraculous trickery revealed otherwise hidden truths. In perhaps the most elaborate “witty miracle,” the saint magically emptied a pyx of water to prove that a young man had been defrauding his father’s accounts. Acknowledging Thomas’s miraculous sign, the father forgave the boy, and together they both praised the saint. They hung the pyx up in the local church “as a joke, and in laughter, to the glory of the martyr” (in jocum et risum et martyris gloriam).82 With this episode, it is difficult to be sure what exactly was amusing about the pyx hanging in the church. But it may be that the act of revelation itself, in the manner of the laughing prophecies of Edward the Confessor, was itself inherently associated with a kind of startled laughter. Saints’ jokes were relatively rare in medieval miracle collections. But tellingly, whenever they did emerge, they usually involved precisely this kind of revelation. forgave a man who had blasphemed him harshly, and even cured his illness and fully restored his faith. Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 6: 72, pp. 470–1. 80  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 3: 51, p. 155. Benedict explains that whenever this story was told by a local priest, it made everyone laugh (“omnes fere quibus haec narravit egit in risum”). See also BoP, Miracula, 2: 22, p. 73. 81  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 3: 21, pp. 133–4. 82  Becket Materials, vol. 2, BoP, Miracula, 2: 50, p. 96.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  137 A further clue to their meaning can be found in collections compiled more than a century earlier, featuring the southern French martyr, Saint Foy (Saint Faith, d.c.300). Among these miracles were many that their compiler, Bernard of Angers (d.c.1020), described as “joca,” or jokes.83 Just like in Thomas’s miracles, Faith’s joca were mostly trivial tales of how the saint ingeniously found objects that people had lost around the house. Others were more dramatic, and showed Foy miraculously revealing certain people in the community to be hypocrites, frauds, or sinners. The reason Bernard gave these miracles the name of joca, he said, was because this was “the way that peasants understand such things.”84 Sadly, this connection is no longer transparent to us. But shortly after the Becket miracles were written, Gerald of Wales used the same name, joca, to describe miracles that he had heard about in Ireland. Gerald’s miracles equally involved shock and ­revelation. One described a talking cross in Dublin, which began blurting out the secrets and scandals of local people.85 Another featured a magical staff that exposed the meanness of people who paid only half a penny for medical remed­ ies, curing only half of their ailment instead.86 As a genre, it seems that “amusing miracles” mostly featured peasants and artisans (although they were copied out in complex Latin for the enjoyment of the elite), and that their major purpose was a titillating type of scandalous revelation. Critically, each of these examples of the saint’s miraculous comic behavior was meant to build upon Thomas’s former reputation as a joker. After all, this was a referential technique favored by the compilers, and we know that many of Thomas’s other miracles worked as a commentary on his in-life preoccupations. William’s collection, for instance, features a number of stories where Thomas, who had been notorious for his hawking while a courtier, intervened to save hawks and sparrow-hawks from danger.87 As Thomas was also a famous horseman, it was apt that William chose to include a miracle where the saint intervened to help a horse out of a hole in Marlow Bridge.88 Becket also helped a monk recover from paralysis at Reading Abbey, the same monastic institution that he had himself consecrated during his lifetime.89 And, as Gesine Oppitz-Trotman has illustrated, Thomas’s reputation for penitence was widely explored and echoed throughout the course of the miracle collections.90 Given this trend, we might say 83  Kathleen M. Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, Writing Faith: Text, Sign and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 33. 84  The Book of Sainte Foy, edited and translated by Pamela Sheingorn and Robert  L.  A.  Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 1: 23, p. 88. 85  Gerald of Wales, Opera 5, Topographia Hibernica, ii.44, pp. 128–9. 86  Gerald of Wales, Opera 6, Itinerarium Kambriae, i.1, pp. 17–18. 87  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 5: 21, p. 389; 6: 109 and 6: 110, p. 502. 88  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 6: 7, pp. 415–16. On Becket’s reputation as a gifted horseman, see Andrew  G.  Miller, “ ‘Tails’ of Masculinity: Knights, Clerics, and the Mutilation of Horses in Medieval England,” Speculum 88: 4 (2013): pp. 958–995. 89  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 6:9, pp. 417–19. 90  Gesine Oppitz-Trotman, “Penance,” pp. 136–47.

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138  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century that it was not so much of a jump for William and Benedict to appropriate and redirect Thomas’s notorious worldly laughter through the course of his miracles. Indeed, the appropriation of Thomas’s notorious courtly wit was made explicit in a letter written by John, Bishop of Poitiers (d.1204). After the bishop wrote to verify a miracle, William of Canterbury chose to include the letter in his collection as a piece of supporting evidence. In the miracle, Thomas was shown prolonging the life of a hanged man, a weaver of La Tour Blanche named Girald, who had committed a malicious theft. Although guilty, Girald successfully called upon the aid of Saint Thomas. Miraculously responding to the thief ’s prayers, Thomas aided him in escaping captivity, and then supported him on the gallows, holding him up by the legs until he could be cut down at sunset by his wife, who was dumbstruck to find him still alive.91 In the Bishop of Poitiers’s words, Thomas had acted in this way specifically because the spirit of joking in his life had now continued into his sanctity. “Just as he was once urbane (urbanus) in matters of this world,” he wrote, “so now he is found witty (facetus) in his miracles”.92 As William no doubt saw for himself, this idea neatly captured the spirit in which Thomas’s laughter appeared throughout the miracle collections. By foregrounding Thomas’s transformative humor, by discussing how he gave people strength to defy death through laughter, and especially by recounting his “amusing miracles,” both Benedict and William were able effectively to sublimate the notoriously urbane humor of the courtier, shaping his behavior to fit a new model of the “laughing saint.”

Becket as a Type of Laughing Saint A further layer in the making of Becket’s laughing sanctity emerged typologically, as Becket became a model for others to copy in their own lives. In the immediate period after his death, Thomas began to be mobilized as an exemplary figure for other clerics and monks to emulate. Herbert of Bosham, for instance, urged Archbishop Baldwin in the 1180s to try to imitate Becket’s show of strength.93 Equally, Nigel Wireker (d.c.1198) insisted to another of Thomas’s successors, William Longchamp, that he should endeavor to do the same.94 While there may well be many other examples in the literature, and still more that were never recorded, I will examine two particular typological explorations of Becket’s laughing sanctity that emerged in the decades following his death. The first is a vivid account of the martyrdom of the laughing martyr Saint Lawrence of Rome, as 91  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 5: 1, pp. 369–72. 92  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 5: 2, p. 373. “[G]loriosus martyr noster, qui sicut et in saecularibus exstitit urbanus, sic et in miraculis invenitur facetus.” 93  Herbert of Bosham, Epistolae, PL, vol. 190, cols. 1073–6. 94  Nigellus de Longchamp [Nigel Wireker], Tractatus contra curiales et officiales clericos, edited by A. Boutemy (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p. 207.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  139 written, in fact, by Nigel Wireker. The second appears in two theological sermons, both of which tentatively compared Becket to the stoic image of a cheerfully suffering Christ. Throughout these different models of laughing sanctity, as we will see, the image of Becket’s saintly laughter elaborated in the hagiographies and miracles was taken a step further. Arguably, the image would go on to shape conceptions of laughter, more broadly, as a unique form of Christian and saintly experience in the later twelfth century and beyond. The analogy between Thomas Becket and Saint Lawrence of Rome (d.258) is a  compelling one. Lawrence was a celebrated early Christian saint and martyr, executed, at the order of the Roman Emperor Decius, on a gridiron. He was also famous for defiantly joking while his flesh was being burned, telling his torturers “I am cooked, now flip me and eat me.”95 Up to the later twelfth century, Lawrence had rarely been the subject of hagiographies produced in England.96 From the literary scene of post-1170 Canterbury, however, two entirely new Lawrence vitae appeared, written by two monks at Christ Church who had both known Becket personally. The first of these works, the sermon In natale Sancti Laurentii by Odo of Canterbury (d.c.1200), was a brief but vivid account. Among other virtues, Odo emphasized how Lawrence kept a serene, beautiful face (pulcher aspectu) while he was being tortured.97 The second of these two works, however, gave an extended and deep reflection on the saint’s behavior and particularly his laughter. Nigel Wireker’s Passio Sancti Laurentii was a lively, long, and poetically complex exploration of Lawrence’s martyrdom, written across more than two thousand lines of Latin verse.98 Here, more concretely and persistently than in any other life of the saint, Lawrence was presented as a type of laughing saint, an image that can be read alongside the vivid depictions of Becket in the biographies and the miracle collections. It is true that both of Nigel Wireker’s two principal sources, the Versus de sancto Laurentio by Marbod of Rennes (d.1123) and the anonymous sixth-century Passio Polychronii,99 had described Lawrence laughing while he was being tortured.100 But it was only in Nigel’s version that Lawrence’s laughter and joking came to 95  See Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri, “Assum est, versa et Manduca,” note agiografiche, no. 3, Studi e Testi (Rome, 1915), pp. 66–82. 96  The one exception is the anonymous Anglo-Norman verse text: La Vie de Saint Laurent: An Anglo-Norman Poem of the Twelfth Century, edited by D. W. Russell (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1976). The date for this text is uncertain, and it may have been produced after 1170, although its modern editor estimates this as the later bound of its likely authorship (pp. 22–4). The text does feature Lawrence laughing defiantly, but only briefly (p. 57, l.888–93). 97  Odo of Canterbury, The Latin Sermons of Odo of Canterbury, edited by Charles de Clercq, with the assistance of Raymond Macken (Brussels: AWLSK, 1983), pp. 196–9. 98 Nigel of Canterbury, The Passion of St Lawrence/Passio Sancti Laurentii Martiris, edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 99  Ziolkowski, “Introduction,” in The Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 52–73: pp. 58–62. 100  Nigel’s sources are discussed in Ziolkowski, “Introduction,” in The Passion of St Lawrence, p. 58. For Lawrence laughing in Marbod’s version, see Marbod of Rennes, Versus de sancto Laurentio, PL vol. 171, cols. 1607A-14C.

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140  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century figure as essential virtues of his sanctity. Not only did Nigel make it signify the saint’s defiance, in the Passio he positively framed Lawrence’s laughter as a pure, mystical expression of his interior spiritual grace. As the saint’s mind was described as merging with the soul of Christ (mentem coniugere Christo), Nigel wrote that Lawrence “spread about wealth, laughed with refinement (risit mundus), and spurned tortures.”101 Throughout, Lawrence’s good humor was figured as an essentially saintly aspect of his defiance. He joked, for instance, while he was being tormented, (ludicra proponens),102 and was shown brightly laughing (exhilaratus ridet) in the face of the Emperor at the moment of his execution.103 Reflecting on the value of the passions and emotions within the poem, Nigel suggested they were a kind of mirror of interior spiritual purity. When he responded to the Emperor’s rage, Lawrence reminded him that it “revealed the state of your mind” (mentis tua facta revelant).104 And when Nigel described the saint preparing himself for death, he noted that his “cheerful face revealed the state of his spirit” (ipsa status mentis facies iocunda revelat).105 In a sharp and deliberate contrast with the Emperor Decius’s anger, Lawrence showed a “smiling face” (hilaris vultus) as an indication of how he had become so “far-removed from these punishments.”106 By the mid-1180s when Nigel was writing the Passio, we know that some of his contemporaries had already established firm links between Saint Lawrence and Saint Thomas Becket. The most obvious reason for the connection was that the two men were both martyrs who had died at the hands of apparently tyrannical kings. Typically, the south porch (completed c.1194) of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres shows the two saints together in the arch of martyrs. Although neither man was shown laughing there, they were both placed mirroring one another on the portal.107 Yet the two saints shared more than just martyrdom. We often see them paired, for instance, within the texts of the Becket miracle collections and hagiographies themselves. One of William of Canterbury’s miracles showed Thomas speaking to a poor blind woman of Eynesford, telling her that, as she could not afford to make a pilgrimage to Canterbury, it would be just as well for her to go to a local shrine of Saint Lawrence instead. There, she rubbed her eyes on the altar cloth and was cured of her blindness.108 William FitzStephen’s 101  The Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 104–5, l.625–8. Here I have adapted Ziolkowski’s translation. 102  Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 110–11, l.737–8. 103  Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 174–7, l.2029–32. 104  Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 120–1, l.927–8. 105  Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 172–3, l.1973–6. 106  Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 162–3, l.1783–6. “Res Miranda quidem, quia quanto plus cruciatur, / forcior in penis et lecior esse probatur. /Monstrat enim vultus hilaris faciesque serena / quam sit ab his penis pacientis mens aliena.” 107  See Émile Mâle, Chartres (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 123–4. 108  Becket Materials, vol. 1, WoC, Miracula, 2: 78, pp. 241–2. Note that both Lawrence and Thomas were associated with curing blindness. Lawrence’s powers for helping the blind are discussed by Ziolkowski, The Passion of St Lawrence, l.413–36. The majority of Thomas’s miracles, meanwhile, shows the saint curing the blind. See Raymonde Foreville, “Les Miracula S. Thomae Cantuariensis,” in Actes du 97e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes, Nantes, 1972. Section de philologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610 (Paris, 1979), pp. 443–68.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  141 Vita even featured an episode in which Saint Lawrence himself appeared in a vision, warning Thomas of his impending death. On his final return to Canterbury, as FitzStephen explained it, Becket and his entourage met a poor priest at Wrotham. Telling Thomas that he had seen Lawrence in a dream, the priest said that the saint had given him his bones to pass on to him, along with the relics of two other martyrs, Saint Vincent and Saint Cecilia.109 With these parallels in mind, it is difficult to avoid the interpretation that Nigel Wireker’s image of Lawrence of Rome was intended as a kind of analogy with Becket, and particularly as a reflection of his defiant laughter. We know that Nigel was an ardent admirer of Thomas, and that the two men had met while Nigel was a monk at Christ Church in Canterbury. He kept a copy of a text he referred to as Vita Sancti Thome in his personal collection, and even dedicated a short poem to the martyred archbishop. 110 More compellingly, the quality Nigel claimed to have admired most in Becket was the same that he said he admired in Lawrence: his intense devotional defiance. He was awed, he explained later in his Tractatus, by the way Thomas had “resisted with manly virtue the malicious, evil days of a world growing old.”111 Any temptation to draw a comparison would doubtless have been intensified by circumstances. During the 1180s, when Nigel was turning to write about Lawrence, a hot conflict was escalating between Nigel’s community of Christ Church and the king over the rights of the Canterbury monks to elect their archbishop.112 Lawrence, as a strong figure who laughed triumphantly to defy the will of kings, made a powerful analogy with the Becket of the vitae and miracles that by then were surrounding Nigel at all sides of Canterbury. By reviving Thomas’s anti-authoritarian risibility through the figure of Lawrence, Nigel was perhaps recalling the old archbishop’s defiant laughter as a way of reframing the tense situation at Canterbury. Yet, Nigel’s engagement had a reciprocal impact on conceptions of Becket and Lawrence. Not only did ideas about Becket’s laughter inform Nigel’s sense of Lawrence, but at the same time Lawrence’s established reputation as a laughing saint would have also provided the author and his audience with a new retrospective reading of Becket. As the defiant laughter of both saints was explored each through the other, the ultimate upshot was that the typology of laughing sainthood became further explored, expanded, and entrenched. Commemorative sermons were another important medium through which Thomas’s sanctity became retrospectively constructed and re-packaged. Over the decades after 1170 Thomas’s example became a regular fixture of European pulpits, and in particular he came to represent an exemplar of resilient Christian 109  Becket Materials, vol. 3, William FitzStephen, 123, pp. 124–5. 110  Nigel’s book collection is discussed by Ziolkowski, “Introduction,” in The Passion of St Lawrence, p. 13n. Nigel’s short poem about Thomas is included as Epigram 13, The Passion of St Lawrence, pp. 264–5. 111  Nigel Wireker, Tractatus contra curiales, p. 151. 112  Ziolkowski, “Introduction,” in The Passion of St Lawrence, p. 16.

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142  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century forbearance.113 Many sermons explained, for instance, how in contrast to his torments Thomas now “rejoiced in the afterlife,” and preachers often referred to how he was a “joyful apostle of the Lord.”114 More strikingly, the joy Thomas took in his martyrdom came to be compared to Christ’s passion. Two sermons, one delivered by Herbert of Bosham in the 1180s, and another given by Archbishop Stephen Langton (d.1228) several decades later, put this comparison in vivid terms. Herbert, for his part, emphasized how Christ had “sustained himself with joy on the cross” (gaudio sustinuit crucem), and had borne the “trouble with contempt.” In the same way, he said, “our own Moses” [i.e., Becket] had chosen to comport himself.115 Stephen Langton, who had done more than any other in his tenure as archbishop to champion Thomas’s reputation, suggested a similar image.116 In a sermon made in support of Thomas’s translation in 1220, Stephen compared Thomas’s own passion to how Christ had sustained the “indignities and taunts” he suffered on the cross with a “cheerful mind” (contumelias et opprobria mente hylari sustinuit).117 Admittedly, here it was Thomas’s smiling face that was immortalized rather than his acerbic courtly humor. All the same, it is curious to witness the particular image of Thomas suffering with a smile beginning to slip into a universal sense of saintly virtue. By comparing Becket’s stoic image to Christ’s passion, both Herbert of Bosham and Stephen Langton were essentially also contributing to the emerging motif of a resiliently smiling Christ. We have already seen in Chapter 1 how certain manuscripts and glosses began to describe Christ smiling in the later 1100s, at the same time that theologians and philosophers were coming to entertain the idea of Jesus’s laughter. Arguably the culmination of this trend was the cult that surrounded Saint Francis of Assisi (d.1226), who came to be celebrated in hagiog­ raphies written in the 1230s and 40s as a joculator dei, or “minstrel of the lord.”118 * * * Reconsidering Thomas Becket’s transformation, it is clear that the conversion of his worldly humor into a saintly virtue was a central and decisive act in the 113  See the “Introduction” in Phyllis  B.  Roberts, Thomas Becket in the Medieval Latin Preaching Tradition: An Inventory of Sermons about St. Thomas Becket (The Hague: Steenbrugis, 1992). 114  See, for instance, Phyllis B. Roberts, Thomas Becket, p. 89. 115 Phyllis B. Roberts, Thomas Becket, pp. 82–3. 116  On Langton’s strategic, yet sincerely spiritual devotion to Thomas, see Anne J. Duggan, “The Cult of St Thomas Becket in the Thirteenth Century,” in St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour, edited by Meryl Jancey (Hereford: Friends of Hereford Cathedral, 1982), pp. 21–44, pp. 37–8. 117 Phyllis  B.  Roberts, Selected Sermons of Stephen Langton (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), p. 56. 118  See Carlo Ginzburg, “Folklore, magia, religione,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1: I caratteri originali (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), pp. 603–76, 615–16; John Saward, Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ’s Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 84–9; and Peter J. A. Jones, “Humility and Humiliation: The Transformation of Franciscan Humour, c.1210–1310,” Journal of Cultural and Social History 15: 2 (2018): pp. 155–75.

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Thomas Becket, The Laughing Saint  143 crafting of his cult. Becket, as both courtier and archbishop, participated fully in the culture, society, and politics of laughter at Henry II’s court. Not only did he seek to make a public mockery of his enemies, but he knew how to lubricate social connections with jokes, while valuing the interpretive power of remaining “philosophic in others' frivolities,” and it is clear that he acutely feared the humiliating impact of derision. What makes the Becket case so spectacular, however, is the translation of this reputation. Many among the writers of Thomas’s cult decided to appropriate these secular experiences and values and managed to successfully transfigure them into spiritual virtues. As a ploy of hagiography, this maneuver first of all tells us something crucial about the nature and development of the Christianization of laughter in the twelfth century. Yet it can also give us a vivid sense of some of the emerging constellations of laughter, linking the new conceptual, imaginative, and courtly perspectives emerging in the period of Henry II. Reframing Thomas’s laughter as a virtue, the Becket hagiographers first of all articulated a number of the theological, philosophical, and narratival principles that were becoming popular in the time of Henry’s reign. Cloistered writers, such as Alan of Tewkesbury and William of Canterbury, appear to have been tuned into the emerging monastic arguments of the later 1100s, which held that laughter could radiate an inner spiritual grace. When Alan imagined Thomas ­facing death with a light laugh, for instance, his image chimed with Bernard of Clairvaux’s own sense that laughter could express spiritual purity.119 And William of Canterbury’s account of Thomas’s death, which showed the saint dying with a certain “hilarity,” echoed the ideas of Aelred of Rievaulx, the English Cistercian who was himself a bridge between Saint Bernard’s Cistercian Order and the monks at Canterbury.120 Moreover, the writers of Becket’s cult made these claims at the very point that philosophers were actively engaging with laughter as a property of humanity, and as they began tentatively applying this property to the figure of Christ. But importantly, these writers were only able to express these ideas through the emergent motifs of holy laughter appearing in contemporary narratives. When Herbert of Bosham described Thomas laughing as he predicted his quarrel with the king, or when Benedict of Peterborough included an account of one of his miraculous laughing resurrections, they were both mobilizing ­literary motifs that ultimately marked laughter as a sign of divine revelation.121 Effectively, Becket’s laughing sanctity crystallized many of these divergent conceptions and forms into a single, highly tangible image. Becket’s miraculous laughter also worked to retroactively endow the witty culture of Henry’s court with a heightened spirituality. Whether defying authority with a

119  For Bernard’s view on laughter, see Chapter 1. 120  For Aelred’s idea of laughing as an expression of “ineffabile gaudium,” see above, Chapter 1. 121 See the discussion of laughing prophets and laughter signaling divine intervention, above, Chapter 2.

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144  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century sublime laugh or playing witty tricks on believers from beyond the grave, these images of Thomas deliberately fused courtly experiences of jocular politics and satire with broader theological and philosophical ideals about laughter and humor. Whereas John of Salisbury had compared joking to finding faith in hidden things, and Walter Map had argued that laughter ultimately led to higher truths, Benedict of Peterborough’s Becket suggested that even solemn miracles could take the form of courtly jokes.122 When John of Poitiers identified Thomas’s mir­ acles as manifestations of his earthly wit, he was perhaps also recognizing, in a way familiar to John and Walter, the extent that courtly urbanity was able to touch upon moral profundity. All the same, courtly and spiritual ideas about laughter clearly influenced each other. We can see how the sort of detached and transcendent laughter that was valued by the jokers at the royal court could translate easily into the political afterlife of a saint. Indeed, Thomas’s sublime humor plainly communicated an extremely powerful political statement. In the vision of his severed head laughing at the king, or in his gentle laughing prophecies, the Becket that appears in the Canterbury writings claimed the ultimate high ground, exercising a heavenly “last laugh” against the king and his tormentors. Here, eloquently, the charged political theater of the court was deliberately translated into an alternative, moral and spiritual sphere. Above all, Becket’s humor epitomized the Christianization of laughter at work in the latter part of the twelfth century. We know that the laughing Saint Thomas stood on the shoulders of a range of twelfth-century laughing saints and joking prophets and participated in the courtly ethics of satire and political joking that dominated Henry II’s court. But images of Becket’s saintly laughter were more than just articulations of a twelfth-century type. Thomas’s example was also an image that retroactively worked to create new readings of older Christian figures, such as Christ and Saint Lawrence. His laughter was a motif, ultimately, that rippled throughout the later hagiographic literature of the Middle Ages. By the time Saint Francis’s companion Brother Bernard of Quintaville was celebrated as a perfect kind of “laughing saint” (sanctus ridens) for “seeming to laugh” as he lay dead, there was already a strong precedent.123 Combining witty miracles, defiant jokes, and laughing prophecies, the cult of Saint Thomas essentially came to embody a new type of transformative, virtuous, and mystical laughter within the Christian hagiographical universe.

122  On John and Walter’s distinctly spiritual views of satire, see above, Chapter 3. 123  Speculum Perfectionis Status Fratris Minoris, edited by Danielle Solvi (Florence: Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006), pp. 106–7.

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5

Henry II, the Laughing King O man of great majesty, who has the power of command and all should obey! O with what a great file of discretion, and with what weight of maturity, his holy mouth is held to be loosed in speech, when kingdoms are moved at his utterance, when all eyes turn to his visage, when his edicts provide either destruction or salvation for the world!1 Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler, 1:19 When King Henry I (r.1100–35) caught a Norman rebel named Luke de la Barre making jokes at his expense, he took a brutal revenge. Not only did he have the man imprisoned, but he also ordered for his eyes to be gouged from their sockets.2 Luke had been a friend to many of the king’s enemies and had occasionally opposed him in minor battles. But it was Luke’s humor, his “mocking songs and reckless escapades” (derisoriis cantionibus et temerariis), that really got under Henry’s skin. Justifying his retaliatory violence, in a speech recorded by the chronicler Orderic Vitalis, the king said that blinding Luke would be a necessary warning to other vassals who might joke in the same way. [T]his jesting songster composed mocking songs about me, insulted me by singing them in public, and often raised mocking laughter against me from the enemies who sought my undoing. Now therefore God has delivered him into my hands for punishment, so that he may be forced to give up his evil practices, and so that other men who learn how his rash folly was cut short may mend their ways in time.3

Rather than facing his punishment, Luke de la Barre chose to beat his own brains out against a stone wall. He was deeply missed, Orderic says, by all those who

1 Gerald of Wales, Instruction for a Ruler (De Principis Instructione), edited and translated by Robert Bartlett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2018), 1:19, pp. 318–19. 2  This episode is briefly discussed in David Crouch, The Beaumont Twins: The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 23. 3 Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 6 vols., vol. 6, pp. 352–5. “Quin etiam indecentes de me cantilenas facetus coraula composuit, ad iniuriam mei palam cantavit, malivolosque michi hostes ad cachinnos ita sepe provocavit. Nunc iccirco Deus illum michi tradidit ut castigetur, ut a nafariis operibus cessare cogatur, aliique dum temerarii ausus illius correptionem audierint commode corrigantur.” Here I have slightly adapted Chibnall’s translation.

Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century. Peter Jones, Oxford University Press (2019). © Peter J. A. Jones. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001

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146  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century knew his courtly humor ( facetias). Yet the message of his death could hardly have been clearer. At that moment, in the year 1124, jokes against the king were not to be tolerated. How things had changed by the time of Henry’s grandson, King Henry II (r.1154–89). An extraordinary moment from Adam of Eynsham’s (d.c.1233) biography of Henry’s friend Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200) exposes just how permissive this later king could be. Bishop Hugh had temporarily fallen out of Henry’s favor.4 After he had taken the step of excommunicating the king’s chief forester, the king’s advisors slandered Hugh’s name with “poisonous words” (sermonibu s . . . venenatis). Summoning the bishop to a meeting, Henry received him in silence and began repairing a bandage on his left hand with a needle and thread. To puncture the tension, Hugh made a daring joke at the king’s expense. “How like your cousins of Falaise you look!” he said, alluding to a family of weavers that could only be Henry’s cousins if it were true that William the Conqueror had been born a bastard. At this the king exploded in uncontrollable laughter. According to Adam’s account, Henry reacted as if “pierced” by an arrow (quasi telo . . . penetrabili).5 He became “dissolved in laughter” (soluitur in cacchinum) and was so moved that he was unable to speak. If Henry II’s approach to laughter was more permissive than his predecessors, it is tempting to read this as a conscious strategy of his kingship. When Daniel of Beccles claimed in his conduct manual that everything he knew about wit was taken from King Henry himself, the claim was not without foundation.6 Henry was described laughing more often than any other twelfth-century king. Contemporary accounts show him mocking enemies with bitter humor, joking while intervening in the legal process, and laughing while dismissing diplomats.7 In turn, Henry seems to have encouraged humor in all who liaised with him. John of Salisbury noticed that Henry even delighted in making “courtly jokes” (curiales nugae) with his physician, Ralph of Beaumont (d.1170).8 Walter Map, who became fairly close to the king, constantly made him laugh while debating points of controversy.9 Even high ecclesiastics apparently joked with Henry as a way of winning him around to their point of view. When Henry castigated a bishop for 4  Hugh was elected Bishop of Lincoln in 1186. See Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, edited and translated by Decima L. Douie and David Hugh Farmer, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), vol. 1, pp. vii–liv, p. xvii. 5  “Hoc quasi telo, blando quidem et levi set mirum in modum penetrabili et preacuto, rex precordialiter traiectus conserit digitos, soluitur in cachinnum, ore supino in terram deponens ceruicem.” Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, vol. 1, p. 117. Here I have used my own translation. 6 Daniel of Beccles, Urbanus Magnus Daniel Becclesiensis, edited by J.  Gilbart Smyly (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1939), p. 92 (lines 2836–9). 7 Jacques Le Goff observed that Henry was a rex facetus for this reason. See Jacques Le Goff, “Laughter in the Middle Ages,” in A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 40–53. 8  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, 210, pp. 338–41. 9  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, Speculum Ecclesiae, 3: 14, pp. 219–20.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  147 his short temper, the bishop answered him with a “witty” (facete) riposte. Bishops, he said, were “no longer made by God, but instead at the command of temporal kings,” and he joked, “Such are the works made by human hands!”10 Understanding the power dynamics of Henry’s laughter may have implications for medieval political history more generally. Yet this focus can also open up specific debates about the role of planning and policy in Angevin rule. Lewis Warren once estimated that the king’s finest achievement was his development of “the art of government.”11 Stretched by his vast dominions into an itinerant kingship, Warren argued, Henry established procedures in law and administration to replace many of those that had previously demanded the king’s presence. While Henry is also credited with encouraging exacting new documentary practices and legal reforms, in recent decades historians have refined this image.12 Under scrutiny, it seems Angevin policies were far more ad hoc than previously thought, and that whim and extortion frequently took priority over regular mechanisms.13 According to the legal historian John Hudson, Henry’s approach to law reform lacked any coherent plan.14 By Nick Vincent’s estimation, Henry was rarely systematic in his policies, and often alternated between “controlling his court” and “standing apart from it.”15 In tax collecting as much as in the reorganization of law and administration, according to historians such as Thomas Keefe and John Gillingham, Henry cared for contingency and flexibility more than any uniformity of process.16 The current historical picture, in short, shows Henry as a leader at tension with himself. While he championed new mechanisms of government, Henry paradoxically preferred to govern through his personal will whenever he could. Ultimately these tensions, between codes and impulses and between bureaucratic procedures and theatrical performances, worked as the major driving forces behind King Henry’s laughter. To this effect, moments of his humor worked as part of a wider economy of political passions. According to observers, many different outbursts served the king’s leadership purposes. Sometimes Henry was

10  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, 4:33, p. 341. 11 W. L. Warren, Henry II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 149. 12  See for example Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 67–8; Ralph  V.  Turner, The English Judiciary in the Age of Glanvill and Bracton, c.1176–1239 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 17–25. 13 James C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (London: The Hambledon Press, 1985), pp. 28–34. More recently, see Nicholas Vincent, “Did Henry II Have a Policy Towards the Earls?” in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, c.1150–1500 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), pp. 1–25. On extortion, see Thomas Keefe, “King Henry II and the Earls: The Pipe Roll Evidence,” Albion 13: 3 (1981): pp. 191–222. 14  John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from King Alfred to Magna Carta, second edition (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 146. 15  Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” pp. 313–14. 16  On Henry’s flexible and sporadic tax collecting, see Thomas K. Keefe, Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and His Sons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). On Henry’s ad hoc attitude to reform, see John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire (London: Arnold, 2001), especially p. 116.

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148  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century noted for his fits of weeping. Jordan Fantosme described him as so overcome with emotion on the battlefield that “tears flowed down from his eyes and he heaved great sighs.”17 But far more often, Henry was sketched by his contemporaries as bursting into fits of anger.18 In the admittedly hostile account of one supporter of Thomas Becket, Henry became so angry that he “tore his hat from his head, undid his belt, hurled his cloak and the clothes he was wearing far away from him, tore the silken covering from the bed with his own hand, and began to eat the straw on the floor.”19 Unsurprisingly, episodes like this caused anxiety among his associates. Following in the wake of the violent conclusion of the Becket controversy, some even reproached him directly. Shortly before the king’s death in 1189, Peter of Blois recorded an interview with Henry in which the Abbot of Bonnevale urged the king that he should keep his emotions in check. Henry’s response was highly revealing. “Why should I not be angry,” he answered, “when anger is a virtue of the soul and a power of nature?” (michi autem non licebit irasci, cum iracundia sit quedam virtus anime et potentia naturalis?).20 Seeing himself as “by nature, a son of anger” (natura sum filius ire), Henry felt that his emotions should be incorporated into his leadership not only because of their theatrical power, but more precisely because they were entirely natural faculties. But how far were Henry’s theatrics intended as deliberate political tools? Historians have recently emphasized the value of a wide range of emotions in medieval leadership.21 In particular, there has been a growing tendency to see affective bonds as inseparable from more formal procedures of political negotiation.22 One of the most important works on this issue remains John Jolliffe’s Angevin Kingship, which argued that bursts of rage were a crucial strategy for Henry and his sons. According to Jolliffe, anger served these kings as a remedy for dealing

17  “Par Deu,’ ço dit li reis, ‘ço serreit grant pitiez!’ / Dunc li lerment les oilz, parfunt ad suspirez” Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle, edited and translated by Ronald Carlyle Johnston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 120–1. 18  Henry’s confessor observed first-hand that the king often alternated between frivolity and fury. Confessio Regis Henrici, edited in Paul Gerhard Schmidt, “Die Ermordung Thomas Beckets im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Dichtungen,” Mittellateinisch Jahrbuch 9 (1973): pp. 167–72. For Henry’s own admission of excessive anger, see Peter of Blois, Dialogus inter regem Henricum et abbatem Bonevallis, reprinted in Serta Mediaevalia: Textus Varii Saeculorum X–XIII, Tractatus et epistulae, edited by R. B. C. Huygens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 375–408. 19  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 112, p. 543. 20 Peter of Blois, Dialogus inter regem Henricum et abbatem Bonevallis, reprinted in Serta Mediaevalia: Textus Varii Saeculorum X–XIII, Tractatus et epistula, edited by R.  B.  C.  Huygens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 375–408 p. 390. 21  See in particular Paul Hyams, “What Did King Henry III of England Think in Bed and in French about Kingship and Anger?” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, edited by Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 92–124; and Gerd Althoff, “Ira Regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger,” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, edited by Barbara Rosenwein, 59–74 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 59–74. 22 For a recent example of this argument, see Michael Burger, Bishops, Clerks, and Diocesan Governance in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 210–38.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  149 with circumstances that laws and customs otherwise failed to cover.23 Insofar as Henry’s laughter may have also allowed him to skirt procedures, it is tempting to read it as operating in a similar way. Yet arguing that laughter served a purpose is not the same thing as suggesting that it was a deliberate act of manipulation. As Paul Hyams has stressed, affective communication was only likely to be effective in medieval contexts when people truly believed that it was rooted in a genuine feeling.24 Rather than calculating his laughter, it may be more likely that Henry simply allowed his passions to live on the surface. But while he may not have consciously intended to wield laughter as a strategy, Henry certainly took advantage of the ambiguity it generated.25 He operated as a “laughing king” in action, if not always in intention. Yet any search for Henry II’s laughter must confront the distinction between the living and breathing Henry Plantagenet and the rex ridens of narrative imagination. Henry’s outbursts were also textual effects, and there can be no doubt that written representations of the king’s laughter had a unique power of their own. In the last chapter we saw how Thomas Becket’s laughter became transfigured in the act of hagiography. From being an aspect of his everyday charisma, it ultimately came to be transformed in the writing process into a virtue of saintly power in its own right. In this chapter I will suggest that a similar move occurred in the chronicling of the king’s laughter. When writers like Adam of Eynsham chose to describe Henry laughing, they drew on—and contributed to—deeper twelfth-century shifts in laughter’s imagined power. They channeled intellectual debates that dignified laughter as a truth-telling device (as we saw in Chapter 1). They also adopted contemporary narrative motifs that associated laughter with divine authority (as we saw in Chapter 2). And equally, they reflected a series of courtly codes, that dignified “discerning” laughter and made it a weapon of political power and justice (as we saw in Chapter 3). In the course of this chapter, we will now see how the making of Henry as a “laughing king” (rex ridens) spun these different webs together. Ultimately, these descriptions of Henry’s laughter made for a potent fusion, bringing together effective practices of political laughter with emerging literary ideas that imagined laughter as newly powerful. Henry’s charismatic laughter also unsettled contemporary theories of the sacred legitimacy of royal power. Medieval political theorists had, up to this point, tended to understand kingship constitutionally as a divine office.26 By the twelfth 23 John E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955), ch. 4, especially pp. 100–1. 24  Paul Hyams, “What Did King Henry III,” pp. 101–2. 25  For a similar argument about Henry’s ambivalent use of emotionally exploitative tactics, see Hugh Thomas, “Shame, Masculinity, and the Death of Thomas Becket,” Speculum 87: 4 (October 2012): pp. 1050–88. 26  At the Councils of Paris and Worms in 829, for instance, kingship had been described as a “ministerium a Deo commissum.” Cited in Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, translated by Frederic  W.  Maitland (Cambridge: The University Press, 1900), p. 141. See also R.  W.  Carlyle and

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150  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century century, however, alternative models of how monarchy should work were creeping into political debate. As Ernst Kantorowicz showed in his classic work, The King’s Two Bodies, legal and theological definitions of the sovereign’s power came to a point of high tension around the period of Henry’s reign.27 Arguably, Henry’s court was a crucible for testing conflicted views of royal power. Perceiving a decline in ritualized royal gestures, some historians have argued that Henry’s kingship saw a “desacralization of royal authority,” a change that extended into more naturalistic narratives of Angevin kingship.28 Some modern readers have also suggested that these changes were driven by the intellectual circle at Henry’s court. John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, with its heavy dependency on classical sources and emphasis on the social aspects of monarchy, has represented for some an important shift from political theology toward a more secular political thought.29 But against this general tide, the royal laughter we will explore in this chapter seems to have been something of a backlash. By locating the king’s authority in moments of inspired charisma and bodily gesture rather than in any legal act or formal charter, representations of Henry’s laughter defied the increasing disembodiment of royal power. As a strategy of resistance, the importance of the king’s laughter lay precisely in its opposition to emerging secular and legal definitions of authority. It effectively became a way of invoking an unmediated, bodily sovereignty in a late twelfth-century England that was increasingly keen on government by codes and written procedures instead.

The King’s Sovereign Laughter Henry II had a unique training as a political joker. Two texts addressed to the king personally sought to give him explicit advice on how to laugh and joke as a part of his kingship. Confronting these two texts now, we are able to get a very rough map of the ideas that bounded Henry’s practical approach to political humor. Henry’s first piece of advice came from the Moralium Dogma Philosophorum (MDP), an anonymous text of pragmatic philosophy composed sometime between A. J. Carlyle, A History of Political Theory in the West. Volume 3, A. J. Carlyle, Political Theory from the Tenth Century to the Thirteenth (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1915), pp. 92–105. 27  Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 28  Geoffrey Koziol, “England, France, and the Problem of Sacrality in Twelfth-Century Ritual,” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Thomas N. Bisson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 124–48. See also Edward Peters, The Shadow King: Rex Inutilis in Medieval Law and Literature, 751–1327 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), especially ch. 3. 29  David E. Luscombe and Gillian R. Evans, “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c.350–c.1450, edited by J.  H.  Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 306–38, p. 326.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  151 1159 and 1170. Dedicated to Henry, who the author named as an “excellent and courteous man” (vir optime et liberalis), the MDP attempted to guide its readers on a path to becoming cultivated rhetoricians.30 The second piece of advice Henry received came in the Tractatus quales sunt, a short treatise of practical guidelines for the spiritual life written sometime in the 1170s by the Prior of Grandmont, William de Trahinac (d.c.1180). Also addressed to Henry personally, the Tractatus was an intimate text that offered the king a range of moral guidance for dealing with members of the clergy. Its focus on handling conflict, in particular, suggests that it was probably written with the disastrous fallout of the Becket controversy in mind.31 From the MDP, Henry received advice that he should use humor as a rhetorical weapon. Amid a host of other suggestions for astute leadership, the text argued that well-timed and well-intentioned laughter could be a useful tool of statecraft. Although the author of the MDP claimed a heavy debt to Cicero, the text’s approach to laughter was nakedly functional. Joking was described as “useful” (ioco uti licet), so long as it was used in situations when serious things (seriis rebus) had already been satisfied.32 Expanding on this idea, the author chose to distinguish between two types of joking. “One is illiberal, rude, wicked, and obscene,” he explained, “while the other is elegant, urbane (urbanum), clever, and witty (facetum).”33 Moreover, he described how laughter could be an important social cue, one able to express subtle details of motive and meaning. Just as the ears could detect “the slightest vibrations in musical strings,” so he urged that the statesman should learn to read laughter for nuanced information about a person’s character.34 So long as it was courteous, laughter could therefore be a powerful weapon in the king’s arsenal. It was able to communicate ideas and feelings more immediately than an equivalent set of explicit words, and, by the logic of the MDP at least, this was a huge strength.

30  On the authorship of the MDP, see John R. Williams, “The Quest for the Author of the Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, 1931–1956,” Speculum 32: 4 (1957): pp. 736–47. Over sixty manuscripts of the MDP survive for the twelfth century. See Barry Taylor, “Medieval Proverb Collections: The West European Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): pp. 19–35, pp. 27–8. 31 The Tractatus quales sunt was originally attributed to Peter of Blois and is included among his works in Migne’s edition. It was, however, reassigned to William de Trahinac, the prior of Grandmont, by Ulrich Broich. See Walter  F.  Schirmer and Ulrich Broich, Studien zum literarischen Patronat im England des 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1962), p. 186. John Benton, however, believed this attribution to be “not completely convincing.” See the review in Speculum, vol. 38, no. 4 (October 1963), pp. 664–6. What is certain is that the work was addressed to Henry II and was written by one personally familiar with the king. A comparison of the language of the work with the language of William de Trahinac’s letter to Henry in 1171 (Becket Materials, vol. 7, letter 745, pp. 448–9) reveals, to my eye, a similar style of literary imagery, and a similar degree of intimacy with the king. 32  Das Moralium dogma philosophorum des Guillaume de Conches, edited by John Holmberg (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1929), 1. D. 1. 33  From the section “De Modestia”: “Duplex est omnino iocandi genus: unum illiberale, petulans, flagitiosum, obscenum; alterum elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum.” Das Moralium, 1. D. 1. 34  Das Moralium, “Conclusio Operis.”

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152  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century By contrast, in the Tractatus Quales Sunt Henry received advice that emphasized laughter’s moral dimensions. In particular, William de Trahinac’s treatise stressed what we might call the hermeneutics of joking. Part way through the text, William included a section discussing the morals of making people laugh. Confessing with a tinge of guilt that many jokes had caused him to him weep floods of tears, the prior acknowledged how humor could be equally useful and destructive in a good Christian life. While he argued that it was fine to laugh at jokes that exposed the corruption of the Church, he said that the key to moral humor was maintaining a sense of perspective about the virtue underneath. Misguided jokes, William warned, allowed hypocrisy to creep in, while offering false comfort to grief, and ultimately led to a dissolution of the spirit. To guard against this danger, William insisted that one had to commit to a moral philosophy of humor. Joking, he argued, was a hermeneutic tool, one able momentarily to reveal an image of the genuine state of things. By piercing the outer shell of a well-intentioned joke, as he explained, the joker would then discover that “underneath the joke lies the truth” (sub joco lateat veritas).35 It may seem that these two texts argued at odds with one another. While the MDP suggested that urbane joking was simply a matter of surface politesse, a pragmatic means for dealing with rivals and friends, the Tractatus was more concerned with the intellectual work that joking could do to shed light on “serious things.” But, in practice, these two approaches were not mutually exclusive. Moreover, evidence of their combined influence can be found throughout the king’s political action. Whether or not Henry actually absorbed the ideas of both these works, eyewitness accounts of the king’s behavior suggest that he effectively managed to fuse together these two philosophies of laughter in many of his political confrontations. Combining the MDP’s rhetorical approach with the Tractatus’s moral hermeneutics of humor, Henry deployed laughter as both a useful tool and a revelatory strategy for: 1) circumventing inequities in the law; for 2) resolving diplomatic conflicts and checking the ambitions of his courtiers; and 3) for negotiating with ecclesiastical authority.

Law Throughout the 1160s, 70s and 80s, Henry II oversaw the establishment of a range of new legal mechanisms and regularized techniques, including new procedures and new documentary practices for accessing and administrating justice.36 35  William of Trahinac, Tractatus quales sunt, PL, vol. 207, col. 1044A-1045A. 36  The General Eyre was established, in the mid-1170s, as a systematic process for providing regular royal justice in the king’s absence. Around the same time, standardized writs “of course” (de cursu) were first implemented to allow clerks to issue writs en masse. Jury trial began operating, towards the end of Henry’s reign, in specified circumstances. The Grand Assize was initiated c.1179, and at some

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Henry II, the Laughing King  153 Although this process was part of a wider evolution of law, Henry showed a keen personal zest for legal innovations.37 He personally drafted, for instance, the “Supplement to the Constitutions of Clarendon” while in Normandy in 1169, a text that insisted on all citizens conforming to precise, standardized, and explicit regulations.38 Standing at the head of a new culture of bureaucracy and routinization, Henry himself arguably provided much of the impetus for these legal changes.39 Despite his concern for an exacting legal process, however, Henry’s laughter often emerged at moments in which he chose to circumvent the strict letter of the law. Indeed, many of these cases reveal the king’s deep anxieties about these emerging codes and processes of power. An illuminating case is described by Gerald of Wales in the course of his Vita S. Remigii.40 Although we have already considered this example very briefly at the beginning of Chapter 2, it is worth going over it again here in more detail. According to Gerald, two men had been caught in Henry’s wine cellar, drinking his vintage collection and slandering the king with indecent and shameful words (indecentia . . .et inhonesta dixissent).41 Standing before Henry and asked to explain what they had said, one of the men answered wittily (facete) that it was “really nothing to what we would have said if the wine had not run out.” At this, Gerald wrote, all present including Henry were swept into laughter (conversis in risum omnis). The king then chose to exonerate the two men of their crime. Or to put it another way, the king laughed at the very moment that he decided he needed to make an exception to formal process.42 Was this a genuine anecdote? Or did it simply represent an idealized view of royal justice? Although Gerald presented this story as if he had seen the action first hand, a look at his sources throws this idea into doubt. As it turns out, the classical writer Valerius Maximus had told a similar anecdote about King Phyrrus in his Facta et dicta memorabilia, a work that certainly circulated in twelfth-century

point before 1181, the petty assizes were established for expediting justice in land disputes. See Paul Brand, “Henry II and the Creation of the English Common Law,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 215–41. Yet, as John Hudson stresses, Henry’s legal reforms had their roots in the 1160s, notably with the Inquest of the Sheriffs. See John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society in England from King Alfred to Magna Carta, second edition (London: Routledge, 2014), ch. 6. 37  Paul Brand, “Henry II and the Creation of the English Common Law” makes this point clearly. 38  M. D. Knowles, Anne J. Duggan, and Christopher N. L. Brooke, “Henry II’s Supplement to the Constitutions of Clarendon,” English Historical Review 87 (1972): pp. 757–71. 39 Michael  T.  Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 67–8. 40 This was written c.1196–9. See James  F.  Dimock, “Preface,” in Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, pp. xi–xii. 41  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S Remigii, p. 63. 42  On this issue, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985) [1922]; and Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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154  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century England.43 Although Gerald failed to cite Valerius, a comparison of the two texts reveals that he borrowed at least the basic structure and wording from the Facta et dicta, if not the event itself. Then one of them [the drunks] said, “This insult you have just related would have been a game and a joke compared to the things we were about to say about you, if the wine had not run out.” From this drunken witticism [urbana], as well as from the simple truth of their confession, the king’s anger then burst into laughter.44 (Valerius Maximus) One of them added wittily [facete], “We may have said that. But that is very little in relief to those things we were about to say, if the wine had not run out.” Hearing this, all burst into laughter, and the king and others relaxed in delight.45 (Gerald of Wales)

While the similarities between these two texts are obvious, Gerald’s subtle adaptations of Valerius’s story are revealing. Rather than an urbane “witticism” (urbana), Gerald styled the drunkard’s remark as a piece of “courtly” humor (facete). Naturally, this was a change in keeping with the values of Henry’s court, where Daniel Beccles’s guide to becoming a facetus courtier had already found a keen audience. Nevertheless, the key elements of both tales remained the same, with a king reprieving jokers for an identical joke in a nearly identical way. Whatever the true circumstances of Henry’s action had been, Gerald adopted a model of laughing kingship that he must have felt suited the king. If we dig a little deeper, we find that classical models of laughing kingship were very important throughout Gerald’s work.46 In passages ripped from Hugh of Fleury’s Chronicle, he particularly praised Roman emperors for mixing jokes in with their serious matters of diplomacy. Vespasian appears in his Instruction for a Ruler making a joke as he died of dysentry, struggling to his feet just before he finally collapsed and making the quip “An emperor should depart from the world standing.”47 Equally, Gerald admired Hadrian for being “witty” (facetus) and “very sharp in provoking and responding to serious speech, jokes, and abuse” (acer nimis ad lacescendum et ad respondendum seriis, ioco, maledictis).48 It is true that magnanimity and forgiveness were becoming fashionable royal ideals in courtly 43  For example, London, BL MS Add. 19835. 44  Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia, edited by John Briscoe (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1998), book 5, chs. 1, 3. “Tum ex his unus, ‘nisi’ inquit ‘uinum nos defecisset, ista, quae tibi relata sunt, prae eis, quae de te locuturi eramus, lusus ac iocus fuissent.’ Tam urbana crapulae excusatio tam que simplex ueritatis confessio iram regis conuertit in risum.” 45  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7 Vita S Remigii, p. 63. “Eiusdem unus eorum facete subintulit; ‘Ea forsan diximus, et illa quidem minima respectu illorum errant, quae nisi vinum defecisset dicturi eramus.’ Ad quae conversis in risum omnibus, et rege cum aliis in gaudium resoluto.” 46  Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 3–4. 47  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 1:18, pp. 270–1. 48  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 1:18, pp. 278–9.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  155 literature and chronicles in this period.49 But, through his immersion in classical literature, Gerald added a more substantial legal justification to the motif of the laughing reprieve. Echoing Horace, in one of his Invectives he described how laughter could occasionally transcend the provisions of law. If someone mocked a person who deserved chastising, Gerald suggested, then instead of being punished he should be absolved. His case should be “passed over comically” (tradit comicus) and the mocker should go home free.50 Despite the importance of these models, however, Gerald was evidently responding to a genuine aspect of Henry’s leadership style. Other observations of King Henry included a wide range of anecdotes in which the king made some kind of exception to the law through his laughing or joking. Walter Map reported, without any classical allusions at all, how a group of Cistercian monks were reprieved by the king after they had been convicted of land infringements. The monks “joked when they should have wept,” but as a result Henry let them go.51 Henry was also shown laughing while circumventing the correct procedures of land law in another of Gerald of Wales’s anecdotes. This time, the account comes from Gerald’s early thirteenth-century invective, the Speculum Duorum. While castigating his nephew, Gerald recalled a series of cases in which young men had tried to usurp the older generation only to be sharply punished. His exemplary tale was of a young man who, although he had the law on his side, was denied his rights at the personal intervention of King Henry. A knight in Kent had been evicted from his lands by his son, who had legal right because the knight had recently transferred all ownership of the holding to him and his wife.52 But when the knight appealed to Henry in person, the king “erupted in laughter” (resolutus in risum), dispossessing the son in disgrace and restoring the property in toto to the knight. Explaining why he had laughed, the king reflected that he had also suffered rebellion from his own sons. “This,” Gerald marveled, “is the way that princes act.”53 Other cases suggest that Henry’s joking exceptionalism extended even to the formal arena of the law courts. Gerald of Wales described how Walter Map, whenever he was present on the king’s bench, always made an exception from his oath to do justice to all men. According to Gerald, Walter usually promised to serve

49  John Gillingham, “1066 and the Introduction of Chivalry,” in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, edited by George Garnett and John Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 32–55. 50  Gerald of Wales, Opera 3, De Invectionibus, 1: 2, p. 22. Gerald here alludes to Horace, Sat., II:1, l.86. 51  Walter Map, De nugis curialium, 1: 25, p. 64. 52  Note that, therefore, this moment could not represent the mechanism of the assize of novel disseisin. 53 Gerald of Wales, Speculum Duorum, or A Mirror of Two Men, edited by Yves Lefèvre and R. B. C. Huygens, translated by Brian Dawson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974), pp. 16–17.

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156  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century justice to everybody “except the Jews and the Cistercians.” King Henry was apparently moved to laughter when he heard this comment (rege ad risum provocato), and asked Walter to explain why he made the exception. “It would be very unjust and unfair to show them justice and equity,” Walter answered, “those who serve nobody else with justice and equity.”54 Admittedly, this anecdote appeared within a long list of stories intended to humiliate the regular clergy. And it is also likely that Gerald exaggerated the extent of the king’s role in the story. Nevertheless, as a representation of the king it is a telling episode. Once again, it associated Henry’s laughter with the act of making an exception to the usual course of the law. How could these images of exceptional joking have squared with a king otherwise so set on implementing strict procedures? One simple answer is that Henry’s personal will, of which his laughing clemency is a prime example, was never intended to be contrary to the rule of law. Instead, as John Jolliffe once suggested, Henry’s joking was meant to operate “within or beside” his wider administrative system.55 In fact, in a number of contexts the king’s laughter appears to have been an integral part of his sense of due process. This is above all apparent in a series of elaborate jokes embedded in the otherwise dry administrative records of Henry’s reign. A curious example is the dubious serjeantry Henry established in Aylesbury. This was a special dispensation made for his otter hunter, a man named Roger Follus. As a condition for his holding, Roger was commanded to provide the king with a bed of hay or straw whenever he came to visit, in addition to offering him either two wild geese or three eels in payment. As Nicholas Vincent has argued, the fact that Roger’s name meant “fool,” combined with the detail that Henry never actually visited Aylesbury at all, suggests that Henry probably intended this order as a grand joke.56 Famously, Henry also granted a serjeantry to a man named “Roland the Farter,” whose tenure was dependent on him performing a leap, a whistle, and a fart every year on Christmas Day.57 Just as this sort of foolery could complement the solemnities of a Christmas celebration, so it followed that humor could function as complementary to the operation of the laws of the land. But what was the precise nature of this collaborative relationship between laughter and law? Gerald of Wales perhaps encapsulated it best in the elaborate explanation he added to his account of Henry’s laughter in the wine cellar. Citing a passage from the Roman law code the Codex Theodosianus, Gerald suggested that the king had laughed to pardon the drunkards as he was adhering to a legal 54  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, Speculum Ecclesiae, ch. 14, pp. 219–20. 55  “Within or beside the rule of law there was another rule per voluntatem, exemplifying, though never openly asserting, its contrary—voluntas regis suprema lex.” John E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955), p. 57. 56  Nicholas Vincent, “The Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, p. 321. 57  Acta, no. 381. Cited in John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), p. 39.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  157 principle of what he called the ius humanum, or the “human law.”58 Whenever critical words were made “in jest” (ex levitate) against a ruler, according to the excerpt Gerald identified, then they should be met “with contempt” (contemnendum) rather than with any harsh punishment.59 Gerald, whose writings occasionally revealed a genuine passion for legal process, here innovatively used the authority of Roman law as a way of harmonizing written procedure with charismatic judgment. In a striking way, this resolved a deep tension that ran throughout his writing. Quite often, Gerald presented himself as a strong advocate for formal legal procedure. He complained how Henry II, by weighing “right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, as it suited him” (ius et iniuriam fasque nefasque pro commode pensans), was an “oppressor of the nobility” (nobilitatis oppressor) and “a seller and delayer of justice” (iusticie venditor et dilator).60 But elsewhere in the same work, Gerald could not help marveling at the power of emperors, who were able to “move kingdoms” with assertive glances or acts of speech alone. O man of great majesty, who has the power of command and all should obey! O with what a great file of discretion, and with what weight of maturity, his holy mouth is held to be loosed in speech, when kingdoms are moved at his utterance, when all eyes turn to his visage, when his edicts provide either destruction or salvation for the world!61

Resolving this apparent conflict, Gerald’s gloss on the drunks who mocked Henry II therefore made a brilliantly novel claim. Although the king had seemingly joked to contravene legal process, the act should nevertheless be taken as a constitutive part of the broader legal procedure itself. Charismatic laughter, in other words, was revealed as an integral function of the law. There is no evidence that King Henry rationalized his own laughter in this way. On the contrary, it often seems that his laughter was motivated by short-term frustrations rather than any long-term desire to bend the law to his personal will. But Gerald’s rationalization suggests that some contemporaries did discern a structural method behind his actions. They saw it not so much as a way of escaping the textual explicitness of law, but rather as a way of supplementing the law with the king’s personal prerogative. At least as these writers saw it, Henry’s 58  On the impact of Roman Law in the later twelfth century, see Ralph V. Turner, “Roman Law in England Before the Time of Bracton,” Journal of British Studies 15: 1 (1975): pp. 1–25, pp. 4–5. 59  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, pp. 63–4. Gerald cites verbatim: Codex Theodosianus, 9.4.1. 60  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 2:3, pp. 450–1. On Henry as an obstacle to justice, see also Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, Opera 5, p. 304. 61  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 1:19, pp. 318–19. “O magne maiestatis virum, cuius est imperare et universitatis obtemperare! O quanta discrecionis lima, quanto maturitatis pondere, sacrum tenetur os in verba resolvere, cuius ad vocem regna moventer, cuius in vultum cunctorum oculi convertuntur, cuius edicta vel perniciem orbi parant vel salutem!”

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158  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century laughter therefore managed to skirt the fundamental paradox of law-based kingship: it allowed a place for bodily gesture and sovereign exceptionalism within the formal procedures of government.62 By laughing and joking to enable judgments that lay outside of the explicit confines of written law, Henry was able to capitalize on his singular position with regard to the laws of the realm.63 But Henry’s ad hoc legal laughter was less of a deliberate rebuttal, and rather more of a frustrated sovereign’s remedy to the law. By instantly revealing the incongruities and injustices produced by some legal judgments, his joking could critique the abstract precepts of writs and mechanisms more sharply and efficiently than any other kind of review. This was a capacity Gerald of Wales and other court writers understood very well. Insofar as it infused justice with the present and personal nature of the king’s will, Henry’s laughter was ultimately presented as resolving and refining the procedure itself.

Politics and Diplomacy During the administrative reforms of Henry II’s reign, the tension between written codes and personal action occasionally emerged in a political distinction between what we might call “subtlety” and “utility.” At the outset of his Dialogus de scaccario, a guide to the administrative functioning of the royal exchequer, Richard FitzNigel (d.1198) stressed his initial anxiety at putting the practices of state affairs into writing. “I was afraid to write a book,” he said, because in such a text “one can neither describe subtle distinctions (subtilium rerum), nor discover delightful novelties (iocunda novitatis).”64 But Richard’s interlocutor pleaded with him to continue writing, insisting that he was not interested in “subtleties” (subtilia) as these were only of interest to philosophers. Richard’s book, he said, should concern itself with useful rather than subtle things (non subtilia sed utilia).65 It was a  distinction that captured one of the major tensions of Henry’s reign. In the operation of Henry’s government, we have already seen that much was said that defied “plain speech and simple words.”66 And among the many actions and signals that kept the wheels of Henry II’s political machinery in motion, moreover, the king’s laughter emerged, time and time again, as one of the most incredibly useful subtle gestures.

62  To use the phrase of Carl Schmitt, we might say that Henry’s exception remains within “a systematic legal-logical foundation.” Schmitt, “Definition of Sovereignty,” in his Political Theology, p. 5. 63  “The King acts as if lege solutus.” John E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship, p. 43. 64  Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de scaccario, in Dialogus de Scaccario and Constitutio Domus Regis: The Dialogue of the Exchequer and the Establishment of the Royal Household, edited and translated by Emilie Amt and S. D. Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 6. Note, here I have adapted Emilie Amt’s translation. 65  Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus, p. 8. 66  Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus, pp. 8–9.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  159 Henry was well aware that his laughter could be a very effective way of clarifying and dissolving divisions and conflicts. A telling example was his diplomacy during the papal schism of 1159. Two rival candidates for the Holy See, Alexander III and Victor IV, both sent independent delegations to the major political figures of Europe for support. To galvanize backing for his own favorite, Alexander, Henry chose to make his courtiers laugh.67 Our account of this episode appears in a letter sent by the Norman bishop Arnulf of Lisieux in 1160. Arnulf himself had wanted to persuade the English Church of Alexander’s merit and had sent a persuasive message in support of him to the English archbishops.68 A pivotal part of Arnulf ’s case was his presentation of King Henry’s strong feelings. As Arnulf insisted, Henry had always declared his favor for Alexander through a number of subtle signs (voluntas extiterit, multis declaravit inditiis et expressit).69 For instance, he said that the king “always received the letters of Pope Alexander with reverence and grace,” while he refused even to touch those that had been sent on behalf of Victor, choosing to make spectacular mockery of the wooden tablet brought in by the representatives of the rival pope. [Henry] refused to touch the letters that had come from the royal hand of Octavian [Pope Victor], treating them as if they were something foul and filthy. Contemptuously, he raised Victor’s wooden tablet from the dust where it had been placed by the hands who had offered it. At once, he then threw the tablet over his head, as high as he could, in front of the messenger. This raised a laugh among all those who were present. Judging from acts like these, it is clear that Henry’s will was firmly in favor of Lord Alexander without any ambiguity . . .70

The theatricality of this joke was of utmost importance. Logical arguments against Victor might well have invited others to engage and debate the pros and cons of his papacy. But Henry’s public mockery was unambiguous and forceful, and compelled his courtiers to participate vocally in the immediate rejection of the 67  For a discussion of Henry’s relationship with Pope Alexander, see Nicholas Vincent, “Beyond Becket: King Henry II and the Papacy (1154–1189), in Pope Alexander III: The Art of Survival, edited by Peter D. Clarke and Anne J. Duggan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 257–99. 68  On Arnulf ’s support for Alexander III, and his persuasion of the English bishops, see Carolyn Poling Schriber, The Dilemma of Arnulf of Lisieux: New Ideas versus Old Ideals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 39–48. 69  Arnulf of Lisieux, The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, edited by Frank Barlow (London: Camden Society, 1939), Letter 28, pp. 42–3. 70  Translation from Schriber, 1. 20, pp. 58–9. Latin from The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, pp. 42–3. “Que tamen super hoc ipsius ab initio voluntas extiterit, multis declaravit inditiis et expressit, quoniam patris Alexandri nuntios et litteras cum reverentia semper exceptet gratia, nullumque se alium suscepturum, adhibita sepe coram omnibus asseveratione, predixit. Porro litteras Octaviani oblatas renuit manu regia, velut immundum aliquid sordidumque, contingere; sed in contemptum eius lignee tabelle, quam ipse statim coram nuntio post dorsum suum quam sublimius potuit, risu multitudinis que aderat prosequente, proiecit. Ex his igitur manifestum est voluntatem eius in favorem domini Alexandri sine omni ambiguitate firmatam . . .”

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160  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century antipope’s case. By laughing together, not only were the courtiers momentarily sequestered into joining Henry and rejecting Victor, but they were also encouraged to send a particular kind of message to the antipope’s envoys. As we know from our third chapter, on humor at the royal court, the humiliation of public mockery was intensely feared in this social and political circle.71 One unfortunate clerk, Ernulf, even claimed that becoming a figure of public mockery was even harder to bear than being estranged from friends and family.72 It was this ruthless power, above all, that Arnulf of Lisieux wanted to tap into when trying to persuade the archbishops, the recipients of his letter, to stand firm with Alexander as papal candidate. If the king’s laughter was an effective way of delivering unambiguous political messages, then it will come as no surprise that Henry used laughter often in his protracted disagreements with Thomas Becket. Although relations had broken down considerably between the two men by 1163, at the Council of Woodstock in July of that year Henry made a joke that brought Thomas to his fullest comprehension of the king’s complex state of mind. Becket had at that point failed in a desperate attempt to flee England by sea. When the archbishop eventually turned up at the council, the king greeted him with a jibe. “Why do you want to leave England,” he asked jokingly (jocando), “do you not think it can hold us both?” Becket’s biographer Herbert of Bosham explained this episode by saying that it was this little joke, specifically, that Thomas finally “came to understand (deprehendit) that the king had withdrawn his heart from him.”73 Although it was slight, this gesture carried a delicate and complex message. On the one hand it made Becket immediately aware that Henry wanted him to surrender. Yet this was the true power of the joke as a form of political communication: it was able to say two contradictory things at once. By virtue of its playfulness, Henry’s remark also showed Thomas that the king still wanted to retain a level of intimacy with him. This was typical of Henry’s provocations. Many of his closest associates tell us that they had learned to read the king’s habits of gesture in order to divine what he truly wanted. The most dramatic example occurred seven years after Woodstock, in the events that culminated with Thomas Becket’s murder. According to William FitzStephen, at that moment the four knights decided to attack the archbishop after reading the king’s anger written in his “face and gestures” (cum vultu et gestu ostendit).74 In fact, Henry often used humor to make political threats. As Thomas Becket confided to Bishop Bernard of Nevers, it was well known that the king liked to make courtiers the victims of public derision. He mocked people, Thomas said, as a way of turning the court’s favor against them.

71  See above, Chapter 3, pp. 102–111. 72  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 160, pp. 740–3. 73  Becket Materials, vol. 3, Herbert of Bosham, ch.31, p. 294. 74  Becket Materials, vol. 3, William FitzStephen, p. 128.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  161 But if he [Henry] senses that he can corrupt you by promises or frighten you by threats so that he can obtain something against your honor and some security for himself in the case, from that moment your authority with him will utterly vanish, and you will become contemptible, a mockery, and a laughing-stock to him and his. If, on the other hand, he sees that he cannot turn you from your intention, he will first take fury, he will swear and swear again, he will imitate Proteus, and finally come back to his senses; and thereafter, unless you prevent it, you will always be like a god to Pharaoh.75

But this was more than a rhetorical warning. As we saw earlier, Gerald of Wales came to learn about this royal strategy the hard way. It was well known to Henry’s courtiers that Gerald wanted to be appointed as the Bishop of Saint David’s in western Wales. Despite this, Henry made a show of Gerald by offering him the bishopric “out of fun, and not in seriousness” (ludicro scilicet et non serio).76 Laughing, the king mocked Gerald by asking him in a frivolous voice “Wouldn’t you like the bishopric of St David’s?” The joke was made all the more upsetting by taking place in front of many of Henry’s closest familiars and rivals for the position. Burned by this experience, Gerald resolved that he would never receive anything but “empty promises” from the king.77 Although at first he had been “corrupted” by these pledges, Gerald now felt that he had become a “laughing stock,” and a figure of fun within the royal circle. This was the sharp edge of Henry’s laughter. But Henry also laughed with his courtiers as a way of building bridges, fixing friendships, and making alliances. Two men who knew the political value of joking with the king more than any others were two politically engaged bishops, Roger of Worcester (d.1179) and Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200). Roger and Hugh were both aristocratic socialites, and both enjoyed an unusually free-speaking relationship with the king. One major difference between the two men is that one was made a saint and the other was not. Consequently, accounts of Roger’s jokes appear rooted within descriptions of political negotiations, while Hugh’s are recorded as minor episodes in hagiographies. Nevertheless, despite these differences it is telling that both of the bishops’ jokes with the king follow a similar pattern. By playfully challenging Henry in public, they both made him laugh in ways that short-circuited or even undermined the king’s powerful position.78 Importantly, they also both managed to successfully change the king’s opinion with the telling of a simple joke. 75  Becket Correspondence, Letter 274, vol. 2, pp. 1166–7. “Si vero senserit quod vos aut promissis corrumpere valeat, aut minis deterre, ut aliquid optineat contra honestatem vestram et cause indempnitatem, ilico vestra apud eum prorsus evanescet auctoritas, et eritis tam illi quam suis in contemptum, in fabulam, in derisum. Sin autem viderit quod vos a proposito flectere nequeat, furorem simulabit in primis, iurabit et deierabit, Protheum imitabitur, et tandem revertetur in se, et, nisi per vos steterit, exinde semper eritis in deum Pharaoni.” 76  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De invectionibus, 5: 8, p. 133. 77  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De rebus, 2: 9, p. 60. 78  English Episcopal Acta 33: Worcester 1062–1185, edited by Mary Cheney, David Smith, Christopher Brooke, and Philippa M. Hoskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. xlviii.

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162  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Roger of Worcester was renowned in his time for his humor. In fact, his c­ ontemporaries frequently referred to him as “jocatus.”79 Yet when he joked with the king, many felt Roger overstepped the mark. In particular, he was quick to provoke a laugh at his episcopal rivals. Riding on Thomas Becket’s plummeting reputation at court in the mid-1160s, Roger made a joke of the archbishop’s apparent moral zeal. He claimed with mock piety, in front of the king and his fellow bishops, that he now wanted to renounce his own bishopric with the same goal as Becket, looking for “my own advancement, rather than that of the church.”80 By the reckoning of John of Salisbury, this was a joke that bordered on indecency.81 It was also Roger, as we saw in an earlier chapter, whose quick wit pacified the king after the archbishop of York’s cloak had been torn in a scuffle at dinner.82 Although on that occasion he pleased Henry to the point of laughter, his joke made the risky move of publicly embarrassing his ecclesiastical superior. Even closer to the wind was the moment when Roger supposedly intervened after the two drunks had been caught drinking in the king’s wine cellar.83 Although Henry had been wronged in that episode, Roger was shown as being comfortable enough to suggest to the drunken men that they should joke their way out of trouble with Henry. As we know, that strategy worked very well, with the king laughing and the two men being let off entirely. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln was also notorious among his contemporaries for his skillful use of humor. While sketching the personalities of the major bishops of his lifetime, Gerald of Wales described Hugh as full of “witty and urbane words” (verborum urbanitate facetus), claiming that his heart was “constantly joyful and his mind secure in jocundity” (continua cordis hilaritate et mentis securitate jocundus).84 We can learn the precise nature of quite a few of these “witty words” from other contemporary observers, who uniformly spoke of Hugh (who went on to be canonized as a saint in 1220) in admiring terms. Walter Map, for instance, recorded how Hugh often used his humor to effectively get his views across to the king. In a passage of his De nugis, Walter described how Hugh, while he was Prior of Selwood, made a timely witty pun to send the king a warning. Observing a group of foresters raging outside Henry’s door, Hugh sent them away by shouting “Keepers, keep out!” (Forestarii foris stent), a play on words that apparently made the king laugh.85 But these witty messages did not always hit the mark. When Hugh tried to tether this little joke about the foresters to a serious point, insisting that if

79 Mary G. Cheney, Roger, Bishop of Worcester, pp. 2–3. 80  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, 238, pp. 450–1. 81  John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 2, 241, pp. 464–5. 82  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, 28, p. 63. 83  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, 28, p. 63. 84  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, 29, p. 68. 85  Walter Map, De nugis, 1:.9, pp. 10–11.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  163 Henry supported these men he would be kept out of paradise, the king mistook the warning as nothing more than a frivolity (verbum serium habuit pro ridiculo). It is difficult to establish if Hugh’s jokes were always meant to dissolve his differences with the king, or whether they were also intended as small acts of defiance in themselves. Occasionally, as one modern commentator has suggested, Hugh’s eccentric behavior offered a flicker of ecclesiastical resistance to the Angevin regime.86 But just as often, Hugh’s jokes were ameliorative and diplomatic. Meeting Hugh soon after the bishop had wronged the king, Henry at first refused to embrace him with a kiss. But Hugh persisted with mock defiance, lunging toward him like a jilted lover begging for redemption. It was an act of clowning that snapped Henry out of his mood. Gerald of Wales, in his amusing account of the incident, explained that Henry then gave in and let Hugh know that he was setting aside his grievance with a laugh (sub risus).87 Just like Roger of Worcester, Hugh knew that making the king laugh was an effective tactic. As Adam of Eynsham remarked while recalling Hugh’s joke about Henry’s cousins of Falaise, the bishop’s “urbane mockery” (urbane invectionis) was able not only to quell the king’s anger, but also to win him back round to his own favor.88 If laughter was central to Henry’s diplomacy, then it was again the Becket controversy that brought the strategy to the fore. Becket’s status with Henry, both before and after his exile in 1164, always stretched the definitions of official rank or position. Invariably, Henry publicly refined Thomas’s standing in relation to his other courtiers through little bursts of humor. When Becket was chancellor, the two men used to ride alongside one another as if they were equals. During a trip through London one afternoon, Henry joked in a way that made a public show of Thomas’s inferiority. The two men came across a poor man on the street, a beggar who was badly dressed and chilled by the cold. Henry gestured to Thomas, saying “Wouldn't it be a marvelous act of charity to give the man a warm, thick cloak?” Thomas agreed. “It would be a tribute to your greatness,” he said, “for you to do such a thing!” But all of a sudden Henry began wrenching the cloak from Thomas’s back. Although he struggled and wrestled, Thomas eventually gave in to the king’s grasp. Smiling, Henry mocked his friend. “This marvelous act of charity,” he said, “will be yours!” When he recounted the tale to his entourage, all who were present laughed uproariously (risus omnium ingens). Then they all ridiculed Becket in turn, offering him their cloaks in mockery.89 At a time when Thomas’s extravagant acts of generous gift-giving at court had brought him

86  Karl J. Leyser, “The Angevin Kings and the Holy Man,” in St Hugh of Lincoln: Lectures delivered at Oxford and Lincoln to celebrate the eighth centenary of St Hugh’s consecration as Bishop of Lincoln, edited by Henry Mayr-Harting (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 49–73, p. 50, p. 72. 87  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Hugonis, 1:8, p. 105. 88  Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, vol. 1, pp. 115–18. 89  William FitzStephen, Becket Materials, vol. 3, pp. 24–6.

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164  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century dangerously close to the grand magnificence of a king, here was a joke seemingly designed to let the royal familiars know, in a powerfully symbolic image, who was ultimately in command.90 Sadly, for Becket, this was not an isolated incident. During his long exile between 1164 and 1170, Thomas became the butt of a great many other royal jokes. This was in part because the king’s courtiers remained in a constant state of  uncertainty about his exact status. According to the frank reports of one ­anonymous observer, some of Henry’s familiars still felt it necessary to denigrate Thomas by “pouring poison in the king's ear,” perhaps a sign of how ambivalent his status with the king remained.91 Again, however, Henry chose to articulate this conflicting state with powerful gestures. At the point of finally repairing relations with Thomas at Fréteval in July 1170, the king famously chose to undermine the process by refusing to give Becket the symbolic kiss of peace.92 Yet alongside this blatant snub, Henry’s joking itself was an equally important aspect of his treatment of Thomas in this meeting. On the eve of his summit with Thomas, Henry joked (jocando dixit) loudly to the king of France: “Tomorrow that robber of yours will have his peace, and it will be a good one!” When Louis asked which robber Henry meant, he continued the joke by explaining that he meant “that archbishop of Canterbury of yours!”93 As a rejection, this was a very stark joke. Despite the formalities of peace, it implied that Thomas was still not the king’s man, and that he should remain the “property” of the king of France. William FitzStephen felt that this little joke was important enough to take a pivotal place in his narrative. Fitzstephen positioned it as a vivid warning to the archbishop that, regardless of any overtures at Fréteval, Henry remained set against the archbishop in the run up to the murder in 1170. How can we make sense of these different moments of political laughter? Whether Henry’s humor emerged through flinging the antipope’s tablets in the air or in his frustration at Becket’s generosity, one of its essential powers was how it could solve and heal moments of political tension. As an arch communicator who had read the advice of the Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, the king knew very well the virtues of ambiguous and nuanced language. Again and again in the examples we have seen, writers emphasized that Henry’s jokes forced his courtiers to face the complexities of political tensions. When he joked about his own fraught relationship with Becket, when he mocked the alienation of the antipope, or when he poked fun at Gerald of Wales’s ecclesiastical ambitions, much of 90  Stephen Jaeger observes, reading this anecdote, how Becket had caused a stir at court by giving the king a gift of three fully equipped and manned ships. C.  Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 300–1. 91  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 43, pp. 178–9. 92  For Pope Alexander III’s response to Henry’s withholding the kiss, see Becket Materials, vol. 7, pp. 198–202. For a discussion, see Anne J. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London: Arnold, pp. 179–200. 93  Becket Materials, vol. 3, William FitzStephen, p. 108.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  165 Henry’s political laughter exploited the gray area between rejection and support, between the black and white of royal favor and disfavor. It was above all by maintaining and manipulating this kind of ambivalence that the king’s joking was able to work as an essential weapon in his political armory. As few other gestures could, his laughter articulated the exceptional, ambiguous, and paradoxical aspects of his will.

The Church Even before the Becket controversy in the 1160s, Henry’s struggle with ecclesiastical jurisdiction produced a great amount of vexation. Occasionally the king’s short fuse translated into laughter. In the early years of his reign, Henry often raged at the English ecclesiastical hierarchy. In 1156, for instance, he dramatically cut ties with John of Salisbury, supposedly because he had “invoked the name of Rome” while appealing to the king for ecclesiastical liberty.94 Disagreements over the rights of the English Church were common, and a cluster of incidents in the late 1150s saw Henry personally intervening in cases where bishops made legal claims.95 Across these moments of tension, Henry frequently turned to a biting humor when he was presented with what he perceived to be an affront to his own royal sovereignty. His laughter emerged in these situations not only as an expression of his frustration, but also as a potent method for undermining the perceived political and moral authority of his clerical rivals. One of Henry’s best spectacular jokes came when he was presiding over a dispute between Walter de Luci (d.1171), the abbot of Battle, and Hilary, the bishop of Chichester (d.1169). Walter and Hilary had been locked in a feud over the relative rights and exemptions of their churches for several years. While the bishop argued that the abbot should submit to his jurisdiction, the abbot, in turn, claimed that his abbey held independent privileges, exceptions that dated to its founding by King William after the Conquest. When Henry II staged the hearing in the summer of 1157, it was a theatrically charged spectacle. With all the major dignitaries of the kingdom present, including the archbishops of Canterbury and York,

94  Giles Constable, “The Alleged Disgrace of John of Salisbury in 1159,” English Historical Review 69 (1954): pp. 67–76. Constable identifies John’s falling out with the king to 1156. The quotation is from John of Salisbury, Letters, vol. 1, 32, cited in Anne Duggan, “Henry II, the English Church and the Papacy,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 154–83, pp. 157–8. 95  Anne  J.  Duggan, “Henry II, the English Church and the Papacy,” p. 162. For instance, Henry supported Abbot William of St Benet’s Holme against Bishop William de Turba of Norwich over the advowson of the church of Ransworth in 1156, and another saw the king supporting the abbot of St Alban’s privilege against the Bishop of Lincoln in 1159–1163. See English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, edited by R. C. van Caenegem (London: Selden Society, 1990–91), vol. 2, 354, pp. 307–8; and vol. 2, 408a-b, pp. 368–79.

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166  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century several bishops and abbots, and a number of leading earls and barons, the stage was set for a jurisdictional confrontation. The Battle Abbey chronicler, who recorded the event in great detail, insisted that “all present were listening intently” (omnibus intenta aure audentibus).96 Proceedings began with the abbot making his own claim, supported with a presentation of the abbey’s foundation charter, alongside another charter detailing the abbot’s own private privileges. The chronicler emphasized how Henry then received these documents with respect and scrutiny, before “looking them over” carefully (circumspiciens).97 Hilary of Chichester’s speech, however, attracted a derisive response from the king. Defending his diocesan rights over Battle Abbey, the bishop began with a lengthy, pompous disquisition on how ecclesiastical jurisdiction derived from Saint Peter’s authority in Rome. In the process, he argued forcefully that the papacy had established such importance that “neither bishop nor any ecclesiastical person can be deposed from his office without Rome's judgment and assent.” It was at this divisive moment that King Henry broke in with a joke. “Quite true,” Henry said, “a bishop cannot be deposed [deponi]. But, you see,” and then the king sharply thrust out his hands, “he can be pushed! [poterit expelli]” According to the chronicler, everyone erupted in laughter at the bishop (arrideret), who carried on with his speech regardless.98 The king’s threat of violence, veiled by the hypothetical cover of the joke, was palpable. Yet above all it was a joke produced by and intended to counter Bishop Hilary’s appeal to papal authority. When Henry next interjected, he was angry (rex ira commotus), complaining that Hilary was using cunning arguments (calliditate arguta) in an attempt to deny the king his royal prerogatives. Provoked by the same jurisdictional frustration as his anger, Henry’s humor was both an expression of agitation and a canny political effect. By making the bishop a spectacle of public derision, furthermore, the king effectively enacted the basis of his royal authority. Uniting observers in vocalizing their opposition to the claims Hilary had made for the jurisdiction of the Church, the crowd showed their support through the very sound of their joint laughter. This was a dramatic scene, and it certainly invigorated the Battle Abbey Chronicle with an extra dash of humor. Yet how faithful was this account? We may be wary that this was yet another example of the trope of the laughing king. Admittedly, the reliability of the Battle Abbey Chronicle’s account is questionable. The work was written in a monastic community notorious for deliberately twisting the truth, by a writer keen to establish for posterity that the monastery enjoyed royal support. The documents cited by Abbot William as support for the abbey’s independence have since been exposed as forgeries, and it seems likewise that the Chronicle itself contains a number of anecdotes and scenarios that were fabricated 96  The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, edited and translated by Eleanor Searle (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 180. 97  Chronicle of Battle Abbey, p. 178. 98  Chronicle of Battle Abbey, p. 186.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  167 by the writers.99 Clearly, the Chronicle’s author had both the motive and the means for concocting or exaggerating an image of Henry II humiliating Hilary of Chichester by making him a laughing stock. In a culture where the public humiliation of mocking laughter was a powerful means of ruining a reputation, the image of the king making a joke of Bishop Hilary was doubtless very attractive.100 But while we cannot establish the truth of the Battle Abbey joke beyond any doubt, we can point to a number of striking parallels in other sources. All of these add up to suggest that this sort of joke was typical of Henry’s leadership style. Frustration at the claims of ecclesiastical jurisdiction seems to have been a wider theme of Henry’s humor in many other texts that survive. It appears elsewhere that Henry’s laughter often punctured lofty or effusive claims made on behalf of  clerical authority. In a dialogue with Gerald of Wales in 1185, for instance, the king again used a joke to expose what he felt to be ecclesiastical hypocrisy. On  this occasion the target was ostensibly the Byzantine Patriarch, Heraclius, although Henry also seems to have wanted to undermine Gerald’s especially fervid and vocal support for the primate. After Gerald had made a long speech praising the Patriarch, who he called a “great man” (majorem) for traveling to England to bring “such honor” (honorificum) to the king and his land, Henry responded at first with mockery (subsannans).101 “If the Patriarch is coming to us, it is because he is looking for his own advantage, not ours.” When Gerald then defended Heraclius, Henry moved to yet more jokes (ad iocos . . . convertens), laughing at how clerics, even though they could easily provoke royalty to arms, always managed to avoid being struck themselves. Gerald lost hope when he heard these harsh criticisms made in jest, but the king’s response can hardly have been surprising to him. After all, he had suffered Henry’s laughter for his own dogmatism before. When he had tried to excommunicate the Bishop of Llanelwy for overstepping the bounds of his jurisdiction, Henry had laughed loudly (risu maximo) with his courtiers, humiliating Gerald for his presumption.102 Consistently we see that Henry’s laughter often arose when he was affronted or challenged by ecclesiastical claims to power. In another case, Master Reginald, a clerk of the Dean of Tours, had confronted the king over the pope’s opposition to his conflict with Becket. Frustrated, Henry made “derisive gestures at the prosperity of the Lord Pope and the happy condition of the Curia,” and forcefully prevented Reginald from talking about these matters with him any further.103 In the ill-fated negotiations of 1167, it was similarly Henry’s hot frustration with the

99  Nicholas Vincent, “King Henry II and the Monks of Battle: The Battle Chronicle Unmasked,” in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, edited by Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 264–86. 100  See the discussion of the power of public mockery at Henry’s court above, Chapter 3, pp. 102–111. 101  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 2:26, p. 533. 102  Gerald of Wales, Opera 1, De rebus a se gestis, p. 39. 103  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 112, p. 545.

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168  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century intransigence of the cardinal legates that forced the king into a burst of humor. As the cardinals were leaving, Henry joked in agitation that he hoped he would “never lay eyes on a cardinal again.”104 Provoking laughter as a response to the cardinals’ show of superior political power, Henry here yet again used humor as a way of immediately galvanizing his own sense of authority. The nature of the ecclesiastical authority Henry opposed was not only political, but was also occasionally moral. At various points the king turned his laughter on the regular clergy, specifically when he felt they had appealed to a supreme moral authority of their own. One joke Walter Map made to Henry on a tour of the Cistercian abbey of Dore, for instance, saw the king laughing at monastic hypocrisy. As Gerald told the tale, the Abbot of Dore had led a company including Walter and the king on a tour of his abbey. When they reached the chapter house, the abbot proudly announced that this was the place that the devil feared the most. At this, according to Gerald, Walter took the opportunity to joke, presumptuously, about the abbot’s overbearing discipline. “No wonder he finds this place more dangerous than any other,” Map laughed, “this is where our guide has whipped so many of his good friends.”105 Blushing, and confronted with a laughing king, the abbot felt forced to admit that he turned to discipline because of the weakness of his monks. They knew very little, he confessed, and were easily lulled into temptation. Hearing this, Walter and the abbot embraced. As Gerald of Wales suggested when he told the story, the joke had prompted the revelation of a “truth through falsity” (sic et veritas interdum poterit etiam a falsis elici). Similar to his jibes at the pope and the patriarch, Henry’s laughter was here triggered by a disconnect between the abbot’s idealized spiritual authority, on the one hand, and the corrupt temporal authority that was needed to support it, on the other. It is important to recognize the role of the text in these different examples of Henry’s laughter. It appears that the description of a laughing king itself, as distinct from its actual perception, had its own powerful impact in challenging ecclesiastical claims to jurisdiction in the writings of the late 1100s. Whether these episodes were faithful representations of events or not, they demonstrated to readers a clear representation of Henry’s supreme power over the Church. While Gerald of Wales confessed to be shocked by the king’s mockery of the patriarch, elsewhere he decided that Henry’s laughter was powerful enough to be mobilized to disgrace his enemies, the black monks. Behind this opportunism was Gerald’s recognition of the great value of laughter for asserting the king’s supreme sovereignty. By showing Henry quickly and publicly humiliating or undermining ecclesiastical claims to authority, images of the rex ridens were highly expedient in avowing the king’s supreme prerogative and command.

104  Becket Correspondence, vol. 1, Letter 149, p. 687. 105  Gerald of Wales, Opera 4, Speculum Ecclesiae, 3: 14, p. 220.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  169

The King’s Supernatural Laughter Most observers agreed then that laughter was an important part of Henry’s leadership style. But occasionally writers gave it an extra layer of significance. Many decided to twist and shape the king’s laughter into an altogether more morally symbolic, even supernatural register. In his dealings with law, diplomacy, and ecclesiastical politics, Henry was essentially described laughing a kind of risus regalis. That is, his laughter appeared as a sign of his wisdom and discretion. It effectively showcased his shrewd abilities of negotiating political challenges with a charismatic touch. But sometimes writers also turned to the more extreme frameworks we saw in the second chapter, the risus mysticus and risus blasphemus. Using these motifs they essentially moralized Henry’s humor, implicitly (and perhaps unconsciously) making it register as either a holy or a sacriligeous act.106 Translating his behavior in this way, writers demonstrated the enduring and powerful hold these narrative motifs continued to have at the royal court. No matter how genuine the political expediency of laughter in Henry’s government may have been, images of his laughter still resonated with a deeply moral and supernatural power in the twelfth-century imagination. Henry’s reputation with ecclesiastical authority was decidedly rough. Remarkably, however, this did not prevent some writers from presenting his laughter as a manifestation of a kind of divine wisdom. Most often, these a­ ssociations ­surfaced when writers wanted to portray Henry’s kingship as heroic, and usually when they were looking to gain some positive royal capital. A vivid example is the collection of Thomas Becket’s miracles produced by William of Canterbury (fl.c.1170–80). As it was initially published, William’s collection contained no mention of Henry II at all. But at some point in the 1180s, William decided to rededicate the book to Henry. We have no immediate evidence for his motives, but it is likely that he now had urgent reasons for seeking royal ­approval.107 With this new allegiance in mind, William made a number of changes to the text, including the addition of a miracle that showed King Henry in a very positive light.108 William described how one day in 1175 Benedict, the prior of Christ Church, approached King Henry with a petition demanding a new confirmation of the liberties of his abbey. As the prior walked up to meet him, William said, the king smiled (subrisit). “Do you know why I smile at you (arrideo), lord Prior?” Henry asked. Benedict was confused, and Henry explained that he smiled because 106  Note that risus regalis, risus blasphemus, and risus mysticus are all terms from Chapter 2, above. 107  Nicholas Vincent, “William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough: The Manuscripts, Date and Context of the Becket Miracle Collections,” in Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident, edited by Edina Bozoky (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 347–88. 108  For a discussion of the dating of the text and its additions, see Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 139–58.

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170  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century the night before he had had a miraculous vision of Thomas Becket. In the vision, he said, the martyr had saved him from great danger. As William of Canterbury explained, Henry had taken the vision as a solemn warning, and from then on had promised to grant the prior’s petition in honor of the martyred archbishop.109 Although William showed Henry smiling and not laughing, there can be no doubt from the structure and tone that this anecdote fitted into the motif tradition of twelfth-century laughing prophecies. For William of Canterbury’s network of readers, this episode may have evoked favorable parallels with another prophetically laughing king. As we saw in Chapter 2, several twelfth-century hagiographies had described King Edward the Confessor laughing in a similarly enigmatic way before explaining that he had had a mystical vision.110 This was an intertextual link that, if he had noticed it, Henry would have loved. It was well known to contemporaries that Henry was much taken with the life of King Edward. He had ordered the translation of Edward’s tomb to Westminster Abbey in the 1160s, and received a text of the king’s life, complete with the anecdote of his divine laughter, dedicated to him personally by Aelred of Rievaulx.111 As a way of charming Henry, it is likely that William’s risus mysticus image of the wisely smiling king was an elaborately historical piece of flattery. In another heroic image, we find Henry II smiling in triumph on the battlefield. In his Draco Normannicus, Stephen of Rouen (d.c.1169) described Henry receiving a letter from the mythical King Arthur at a critical moment in one of his military campaigns. Henry had just conquered Brittany, but in the letter, Arthur insisted that he must capitulate to him, as he was still the rightful King of England, France, and Brittany. Upon reading this mystifying note, Stephen said, Henry “smiled with his familiars, fearing nothing” (subridens sociis nil pauefactus), before continuing to wage battle with renewed vigor.112 Henry then promised that after he had succeeded in conquering Brittany he would agree to hold the territory in fief as Arthur’s vassal. With this joke at the romanticism of the Bretons, Stephen effectively tailored his description to flatter Henry and edify his cause.113 After all, we know that laughing in battle was regularly used as a symbol of righteous defiance in twelfth-century narrative. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s own King Arthur laughed as he fought his way to victory, as did Chretien de Troyes’s Sir Gawain.114

109  Becket Materials, vol. 1, William of Canterbury, Miracula  S.  Thomae Cantuariensis, 6: 97, pp. 493–4. 110  See above, Chapter 2, pp. 60–63. 111  Aelred’s text is discussed in Chapter 2, pp. 62–3. 112  Stephen of Rouen, Draco Normannicus, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, edited by R. Howlett, vol. 2 (London: Rolls Series, 1184–1189), pp. 695–708. 113  Martin Aurell, “Henry II and Arthurian Legend,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 362–94, p. 386. 114  Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Brittaniae, edited by Acton Griscom (Geneva: Slatkine, 1977), ch.10, 3; Chrétien de Troyes, The Story of the Grail (Li Conte del Graal), or Perceval, edited by Rupert T. Pickens, translated by William W. Kibler (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 345, l.7036.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  171 Stephen of Rouen would also have been familiar with accounts of William I’s invasion of Britain, in which the conquering king was portrayed joking as he first set foot on English soil.115 All these different images of laughing and smiling on the battlefield carried powerful, even quasi-spiritual associations. They cemented a leader’s image of blessed resilience in the face of military hardship. 116 We have already seen extensive evidence that Gerald of Wales was critical of Henry at the best of times. But in an anecdote from his De principis, even he chose to shade the king’s humor with a prophetic coloring. This was a moment charged with significance for the inheritance of the Angevin realm. As Henry lay dying, although he had been feuding with his son Richard, he chose to give him the kiss of peace. Of course this was an important symbolic act, one that signaled Henry’s endorsement of Richard as his heir. But, as Gerald said, the king simultaneously undermined the ritual with a joke. As he made the kiss, Henry whispered in Richard’s ear “God will not let me die so long as I am able to take vengeance on you!” According to Gerald, the warning stirred the King of France and his courtiers into fits of admiring laughter (risum pariter et admirationem excitavit).117 We should be careful in making any connections here with examples of explicitly spiritual laughter. After all, even Henry’s most ardent supporters hardly presented him as a devout or pious king. But all the same, the way this episode was written gave it a distinctly saintly tone. It is intriguing that, as a matter of convention in twelfth-century texts, the only characters who ordinarily laughed or joked on their deathbeds were saints or prophets. Edward the Confessor, for instance, was celebrated by hagiographers for making a famous prophecy while he lay dying.118 A range of exempla and miracle texts from the final decades of the 1100s showed the most blessed and devout monks and knights all making people laugh with their final breaths.119 As one twelfth-century manual on the art of dying maintained, remaining “cheerful up to the final moments” was the special preserve of the Christian elect.120 By writing up this deathbed laughter, Gerald may have been showing a grudging sympathy for King Henry, or else he may have wanted to insert a prophetic threat in his narrative to further undermine the legitimacy of Richard’s reign. But in either case, whether implicitly or inadvertently, his image of Henry joking at the point of death elevated the king to an unexpected symbolic equivalence with the laughing prophets. 115  This theme was repeated in two narratives: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum, 242, pp. 454–5; and William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi ii: 9, pp. 114–17. 116  See above, Chapter 2, pp. 60–69, and pp. 76–84. 117  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 3:26, p. 681. 118  Aelred of Rievaulx, Vita S. Edwardii Regis et Confessoris, PL, vol. 195, ch. 26. 119  One exempla, in Oxford, MS Bod. Auct. D. 2. 12, f.88r, for instance, features a monk who “never laughed in his whole life, except out of holiness while he was shepherded from the misery of this life to the next.” An exemplary miracle from the period can be found in Becket Materials, vol. 2, Benedict of Peterborough, Miracula, 2: 65, pp. 109–10. Here, a man became “more cheerful than he had ever been in his whole life” after St Thomas visited him on his deathbed. 120  Montpellier, MS Bib. Medicine, H 539 (De Origine Mortis Humane): “Quidam autem electi . . . in ipso suo fine hilarescunt eternorum contemplatione bonorum.”

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172  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Perhaps unsurprisingly, writers were quicker to give Henry’s laughter some explicitly diabolical associations. As we saw in Chapter 2, the image of the risus blasphemus—reckless and foolish laughter that was promptly punished by divine intervention—was well-established in twelfth-century narrative and carried a number of powerful Christian and providential implications. Of course, as with William Rufus, suggesting that a king deserved divine retribution for laughing at God was a rather extreme criticism.121 Yet in the work of three writers whose careers had suffered bitterly from Henry’s actions—John of Salisbury, Gerald of Wales, and Thomas Becket—this motif was mobilized as a type of literary revenge. Depicting the king in the mold of a mocking Herod or Lucifer, these writers drew on laughter’s reservoir of diabolical associations, as well as on the sense that humor stood either on the side of justice or oblivion, of piety or treachery. First of all, there is the example of John of Salisbury. Shortly after he had fallen out of favor with the king in 1156, John began revising his long poem of moral advice for courtiers, the Entheticus. Now a clandestine text, intended only for private circulation among a few intimate friends, the updated poem contained long warnings about the traps and loose morals that John said needed to be avoided at the royal court. Included among these passages were lightly veiled condemnations of King Henry himself, focusing particularly on his reprehensible humor.122 In one section, John described him disparagingly as the funambulus, or “ropedancer” king: Drunk with the gift of Fortune the new court under a youthful king believes that all things are lawful for it. You would think that both young and old men are equally mad [insanire], the judge is mad and his office. The court loves, hears, honors only the triflers; every courtier holds the arts as detested; the courtier hates the arts which serve virtue, but every courtier loves servants of the flesh. That rope-dancer [funambulus], who defends by the law of his grandfather whatever he attempts, has introduced these morals to the court. Those who have a taste for trifles and crimes, are called upon by the law; those who have the right taste [qui recte sapiunt], the law orders to go abroad.123

This was a targeted attack. There could be no doubt that Henry, who was notoriously obsessed with the customs of his own grandfather, was meant as the

121  See the discussion in Chapter 2, above, pp. 69–70. 122  For a discussion of the Entheticus, see Rodney M. Thomson, “What is the Entheticus?” in The World of John of Salisbury, edited by Michael Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 287–301; and Ronald E. Pepin, “The Entheticus of John of Salisbury: A Critical Text,” Traditio 31 (1975): pp. 127–93. 123  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Maior, 3: 95, pp. 200–1. “Ebria fortunae donis nova curia rege sub puero credit, cuncta licere sibi. Insanire putes aeque iuvenesque senesque; insant iudex officiumque suum. Curia nugaces solos amat, audit, honorat, artes virtuti famulantes aulicus odit, sed famulas carnis aulicus omnis amat. Hos aulae mores funambulus intulit ille, qui, quod praesumit, lege tuetur avi. Qui sapiunt nugas et crimina, lege vocantur; qui recte sapiunt, lex iubet ire foras.”

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Henry II, the Laughing King  173 “rope-dancer” ruler. But what makes this passage extraordinary is that John connected court frivolity with a kind of carnivalesque inversion of political order, an overturning of correct law and good judgment. With the gloves off, John’s moral assassination essentially diagnosed royal humor as both corrosive and infectious. As he warned, by elevating the judgment of jokers above those who “have the right taste” (qui recte sapiunt), Henry had cast his courtiers “headlong into evil” (in mala praecipitat), As a consequence, they all implicitly risked the threat of damnation.124 Another writer who applied this moral framework to Henry’s laughter was Thomas Becket. Yet Thomas and his biographers went even further, investing the king’s humor with a richer set of biblical and theological dimensions. For one, they compared him to King Herod, who had famously mocked and ridiculed Christ (Luke 23: 11). Becket’s confidante William of Sens, for instance, bitterly scalded Henry as a “new Herod of our times” in two letters to the pope written in the aftermath of Thomas’s death.125 Admittedly, one of the reasons for the comparison was that, just like Henry, Herod had forced his enemies into exile.126 But the king’s mocking humor was placed front and center in the Becket circle’s criticisms of Henry’s folly. As we have seen, Becket himself especially critized the king’s manipulative laughter. In the letter he sent to the Bishop of Nevers, he warned that the king mocked his enemies as a way of publicly degrading them.127 As he advised his friend the Cardinal John, Henry encouraged people to maliciously “dissolve in laughter” at ecclesiastical interests as a way of injuring and obstructing what he called the “cause of the Church.”128 Although Becket did not go so far as to suggest that Henry should be damned for his laughter, his implications were clear: the king’s mockery was set against God’s will. Decades later, an embittered Gerald of Wales picked up a similar theme.129 Reflecting on Henry II’s death, Gerald implied that he had received a kind of 124  John of Salisbury, Entheticus Major, I: 25, pp. 128–9. 125  See Roger of Howden, Chronica, edited by William Stubbs (London: Rolls Series, 1869), vol. 2, p. 19 and p. 24. Elsewhere, the author of the Summa causae inter regem et Thomam said of Henry, “the king was greatly troubled, and all Jerusalem with him,” a quotation describing Herod from Matthew, 2:3. See Becket Materials, vol. 4, p. 204. 126 Thomas Becket compares Henry to Herod for this reason in one of his letters: Becket Correspondence, vol. 2, letter 216, pp. 938–9. 127  Becket Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 274, p. 1166. 128  Becket Correspondence, vol. 2, Letter 219, p. 964. 129  Gerald of Wales evidently switched between different motifs of laughter throughout his writing. Depending on his changing agenda, Gerald showed King Henry’s laughter sometimes as divine and sometimes as damnable, sometimes as politically shrewd and sometimes as politically foolish. As David Knowles once observed, it is difficult to pin Gerald down to any genuine beliefs. (David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge: The University Press, 1940), p. 668). For a comparable example of how his views fluctuated according to his purposes, see how Gerald once dismissed as superstition the idea that St Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland, while at another point presenting the same fact as truth. (Cited by Ad Putter, “Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin,” in Anglo-Norman Studies 31, edited by C.  P.  Lewis (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2009), pp. 90–103). On balance, it appears that Gerald worked pragmatically, using different themes according to his shifting purposes.

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174  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century divine punishment when his own courtiers had laughed at a prophecy. By Gerald’s account, Richard de Redvers, the king’s cousin, had received a startling prophetic vision, foretelling that Henry would die within two months. Soon the prophecy was repeated to the archbishop, who sternly passed it on to a number of royal familiars. Hearing the news, however, the audience at court ignored the warning. Instead they “passed them off with a playful laugh as wandering and absurd rather than serious” (ridiculosa magis quam seria sub risu ludicro pertransierunt).130 But soon afterwards their mockery was silenced when the king suddenly died, just as had been predicted in the prophecy. Echoing William Rufus’s notorious laughter, which also had been targeted at visions of his own death, in this moment Gerald offered the irresistible implication that Henry’s demise was precipitated specifically by an act of profane mockery.131 Although the king did not laugh himself, Gerald effectively blamed this blasphemy on a wider culture of frivolous jocularity, one which he said (just like John of Salisbury did) that Henry had encouraged at court personally, as a matter of course. Gerald expanded on the immorality of Henry’s laughter at different points throughout his writing. In particular, he often chose to make it a sign of the king’s inevitable decline and fall. Describing how Henry’s sons rose up against him in rebellion in the 1170s, in his Vita S. Remigii Gerald explained this act of treachery as a punishment for the king’s mocking laughter. “Perhaps it was foreseen,” he wrote, because “those who mock and deride the pious are paid back by being ridiculed themselves.”132 Going even further, in his De principis Gerald framed Henry’s entire life as a moral tale, as an arc in which the king’s blasphemous mockery was eventually punished by his downfall.133 Reflecting on the shape of Henry’s career, Gerald gave an explicit warning about the king’s derisive laughter. Those who scorned and mocked were destined to be damned, he wrote. By contrast, those who suffered from derision were destined to be raised up to heaven. Gerald implied that Henry was exactly the type who laughed this kind of risus blasphemus, whose miserable fate was then precipitated by the “changing mockeries of Fortune” (varia fortunae ludibria).134 Just as with their holy equivalents, these diabolical images of Henry’s humor emerged only in very specific circumstances. Writers tended to reach for them when they wanted to say that Henry’s corrupt morals had tainted his career, or else when they were compelled to express strong personal grievances against the king. John of Salisbury, Thomas Becket, and Gerald of Wales all had very personal

130  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 3:14, pp. 622–3. 131  William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, edited and translated by Roger  A.  B.  Mynors, Rodney  M.  Thomson, and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 331, pp. 570–1. 132  Gerald of Wales, Opera 7, Vita S. Remigii, p. 62. 133  Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 71. 134  Gerald of Wales, Instruction, 2:1, pp. 436–7.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  175 motivations for spinning the king’s actions as symbols of his deeper immorality. And certainly, at least both John and Gerald were well-read enough to be aware of the power of diabolical images of laughter in twelfth-century texts. Yet their sabotage of the king’s notorious humor tells a deeper story of the symbolic power of laughter in the textual world of twelfth-century England. While benign laughter could be a sign of a king’s heroism and holiness, Gerald of Wales and the propagandists in the Becket circle knew that throwing the spotlight on the king’s wayward laughter could also cast him in the worst light possible. This association could immediately color him as a figure deserving the worst divine punishment and ultimate retribution.

The King’s Two Laughs How can we reconcile Henry’s expedient, governmental humor with these more symbolic and supernatural images of his laughter? At one level, it is important to see how one form was framed by the other. Descriptions of the king laughing the risus mysticus or the risus blasphemus remind us that, just as in the case of Thomas Becket, twelfth-century writers could quickly translate a reputation for humor in “real life” into an intensely moralized image of laughter. But rather than throwing the everyday descriptions of Henry’s laughter into doubt, these moralized descriptions invite us to recognize the implicitly supernatural power that contemporaries may have perceived in the king’s political laughter. When writers observed Henry laughing in governmental affairs, after all, the act was often intimately bound up with questions about his destiny, his triumph, or his failure. Equally, when writers showed Henry laughing while intervening in legal or bureaucratic procedures, they often framed it as a moment of wondrous exception in the course of ordinary human affairs. If we reflect on the different contexts in which Henry’s humor appeared, we quickly notice that much of his joking was directed toward written texts. Over and over, the king was shown laughing at what he felt to be unsupportable claims made in writing. When he chose to make his courtiers laugh at the cause of the antipope Victor IV, it was specifically the tablets on which Victor’s messages were written that Henry mocked. Likewise, when Hilary of Chichester made an elaborate claim to written authority to support ecclesiastical power, Henry was agitated into making a cruel joke about deposing him. Similarly, it was the zealous application of the written precepts of land law, in the case of the man who had been dispossessed by his rebellious son, that made the king burst into laughter. We can even see this theme extending into the examples of Henry laughing the more symbolic risus mysticus. When Stephen of Rouen imagined him smiling at King Arthur’s threatening letter in the Draco Normannicus, he was essentially showing Henry being amused by a spurious appeal that had been made in writing.

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176  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Looking a little closer, it seems that much of the king’s humor was closely bound up with anxieties about abstract tools of power. Henry may well have felt trapped by his own network of laws, bureaucratic codes, and mechanisms. As one modern scholar has put it, Angevin government often seemed to be a system that “imprisoned its victims and practitioners alike.”135 We have seen how Henry especially laughed and joked in situations where he felt that a reliance on codes or strict protocols had come to exceed his own experience of reality. Above all, he laughed at impersonal written claims to authority. Henry’s cruel joke at the expense of Hilary of Chichester, for instance, came midway through the bishop’s declaration of legal fidelity to the pope. Henry’s burst of laughter here seems to have been intended to illustrate to Hilary, and those watching, that a bishop’s true experience of power could not be separated from the king’s will in such a way.136 Similarly, when Gerald of Wales preached the good intentions of the patriarch, Henry’s joke sought to subvert Gerald’s pious faith in ecclesiastical purity. Skeptical and pragmatic, Henry’s laughter so often worked by puncturing high ideals. Just as he laughed at Walter Map’s jocular rejection of the ideal equality of law, he joked with equal relish at the idealistic claims of the antipope Victor. In each case, there was a high point of tension between personal authority and abstract ideals or principles. By laughing, the king was able to demonstrate his sovereign capacity to suspend rules through making an exception. In this sense, Henry’s laughter effectively blended together the different rhetorical and hermeneutic approaches to humor that he absorbed through the two treatises dedicated to him personally, the Moralium Dogma Philosophorum and the Tractatus quales sunt. In the manner of the rhetorical manual, Henry’s laughter frequently united his courtiers in a social act, allowing him to communicate subtle messages that defied simple definition. Equally, just as William de Trahinac advised in his Tractatus, Henry often concealed profound truths beneath a joke (sub joco lateat veritas).137 We could say, paraphrasing another critic, that Henry found laughing to be a means of articulating a “pure presence” that could not be captured with words alone.138 This was particularly the case in his diplomatic confrontations and legal dealings. Whether demonstrating to Thomas Becket the convoluted and provisional nature of his political status, or making clear to his bishops that he was not afraid to counter papal jurisdiction with violence, the king often laughed and joked in a way that staked out an irreducibly nuanced position.

135  Karl J. Leyser, “The Angevin Kings,” p. 50. 136 Of course, the culmination of this logic of the king’s physical power was Thomas Becket’s martyrdom. 137  William of Trahinac, Tractatus quales sunt, PL vol. 207, col. 1044A-1045A. 138  Paul Zumthor and Marilyn C. Engelhardt, “The Text and the Voice,” New Literary History 1: 16 (1984): pp. 67–92, p. 75.

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Henry II, the Laughing King  177 But Henry’s laughter was also an inextricably textual effect, one that was produced and mediated by writers as a sign within the structure of narrative works. Textual laughter, as we know, had a unique power in this period. Recent studies have observed that emotional representations in twelfth-century writings were often read as “active textual agents.”139 A moment of intense passion on the page, in other words, was often able to produce vivid emotional reactions for the reader. If we have seen in this chapter that laughter played a transformative and authoritative role in the narrative works that remembered Henry II, then this must also be appreciated within the specific literary conventions of the royal court. As we saw in in Chapter  1, laughter acquired a sublime power as a sign of wisdom, rhetorical grace, and medical vitality in the intellectual texts of the later 1100s. Equally, we suggested in Chapter 2 that laughter came to be a sign of potent transformation across the wide web of narrative works familiar to the writers of the reign of Henry II. At the same time however, as we suggested in Chapter 3, laughter was now becoming increasingly important in the political action of Henry II’s entourage. Ultimately, these different intellectual, literary, and political factors operated in tandem in the creation of Henry as rex ridens. As a textual image, the laughing king was as much a product of a deeply literate and satirical court culture as it was the powerfully effective political phenomenon that was experienced by contemporaries. If the king had two laughs (one actual and one textual), then the experience of either one was always shaped by encountering the other. But regardless of whether it was encountered as a textual image or as a moment of “real life” politics, what made Henry’s laughter especially powerful was how it negotiated one of the fundamental political developments of the twelfth century. It is well known that Henry’s reign saw written mechanisms increasingly replacing systems that had traditionally relied on royal presence.140 In many ways these bureaucratic forms introduced an extra layer of alienation, separating the person of the sovereign from the specific principles underwriting his power.141 It is important, of course, not to overemphasize the dichotomy between speech and writing. Written forms of communication clearly depended upon symbolic gestures, to the extent that “one rarely worked without the other,” as one historian of thirteenth-century kingship has observed.142 But all the same, contemporaries

139 Richard  E.  Barton, “Emotions and Power in Orderic Vitalis,” in Anglo-Norman Studies 33, edited by C. P. Lewis (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), pp. 41–59. 140  For example, W.  L.  Warren, Henry II, p. 149; Michael  T.  Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 67–8; John Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law, ch. 6; John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire; Paul Brand, “Henry II and the Creation of the English Common Law,” pp. 215–41. 141  On this shift more generally, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. 142 Björn Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture: England and Germany, c.1215–1250 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. 138. On textuality and orality as improvised positions, see John H. Arnold, “A Man Takes an Ox by the Horn and a Peasant by the Tongue: Literacy, Orality and

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178  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century certainly observed the tension between procedural and charismatic forms of leadership as being central to the political landscape of Angevin England. Responding to this tension, we may say that Henry’s frustrated laughter redressed a perceived imbalance. Encountering a dry political machinery, increasingly characterized by writs, charters, and pipe rolls, the king’s laughter provided an alluring shot of physical and charismatic authority.143 Inquisition in Medieval Languedoc,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, edited by Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 31–47. 143 On the issue of charisma in medieval Europe, see the discussion in C.  Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 1–20.

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Conclusion Between Laughing Saint and Laughing King

This book began with some enigmatic images of powerful laughter, from laughing miracles and resurrections to prophetic jokes and moments of career-destroying mockery. Most intriguing of all were the spectacular images of the laughing Henry II and Thomas Becket, which were recorded in English Latin sources as essential capacities of their royal and saintly power. At the outset I wanted to investigate the intellectual, cultural, and political basis for this powerful laughter, explaining in the process how it came to preoccupy writers at Henry II’s court. As I would like to suggest, their fixation on laughter was the culmination of a series of broader movements in twelfth-century intellectual, imaginative, and sociopolitical discourses. We have seen how these potent images of the rex ridens and the sanctus ridens grew from an intellectual culture that began identifying laughter as a virtuous power within the body, within narrative genres that often framed laughter as a transcendent moral and political force, and were recorded by writers who blossomed at a court that valued laughing and joking as essential ways of negotiating curial power. The way these different movements may have fitted together, inspiring images of both the laughing saint and the laughing king, may now be mapped out a little further. Essentially, over the course of the five chapters we have seen how two distinct kinds of powerful laughter operated within twelfth-century texts: one divine, transcendent, and moral; the other political, probing, and expedient. Across intellectual, cultural, and social discourses, first of all, it appears that laughter acquired a positive Christian dimension throughout the 1100s. As I argued in the first three chapters, a space for conceiving spiritual laughter in Henry’s II’s England came to be created through a series of imaginative and conceptual developments, alongside the particular moral and political concerns of the royal court. Debates within biblical exegesis, philosophy, and especially monastic theology began to suggest that embodied laughter could radiate divine grace. These ideas were simultaneously given a vivid form in hagiographies, histories, and poems, which from the 1130s onwards increasingly depicted laughter as a medium of ecstatic or mystical contact with God. Among Henry’s courtiers, meanwhile, laughing and joking was increasingly imagined as having the power to reveal otherwise inaccessible truths, just as wit came to be seen as a way of penetrating to a higher moral understanding. Generally speaking, these principles of divine, moral, and Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century. Peter Jones, Oxford University Press (2019). © Peter J. A. Jones. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198843542.001.0001

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180  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century transcendent laughter crystallized in the 1170s and 80s through images of Thomas Becket as a laughing saint, whose courtly joking came retrospectively to be cast as a prophetic power in life and as a miraculous virtue in death. Contemporaneous with this development, I want to suggest that laughter also came to be respected as a powerful political tool throughout the 1100s. Sharpened by the arguments of Cicero and Quintillian, a number of rhetoricians began conceptualizing provocative laughter and quick humor as effective means for debating and persuading. Meanwhile, unprecedented narrative images emerged in chronicles, histories, and epic poems around about the middle of the century, representing laughter as an effective form of governance and kingship. At Henry’s court, more practically, laughter quickly gained status as a vital method of political maneuvering, successfully used by courtiers as a means of defeating rivals, fostering rapport, and negotiating unspoken political hierarchies. Ultimately these political dimensions were made manifest in Henry II’s habit of overruling judgments with laughter and managing his courtiers with a charismatic humor. As Bishop Hugh of Lincoln knew so well, by the later twelfth century the art of making people laugh had become an invaluable way of furthering careers, forging political alliances, and communicating the sort of subtle distinctions that were so valued at a royal court that relied on the implicit negotiation of diplomacy and hierarchy. Yet of course, these religious and political powers were also deeply intertwined. Throughout each of the five chapters, I have tried to show how moral and political laughter converged as forms of charismatic—or sublime—power. Monastic writers who developed the idea that laughter could radiate an interior grace, for instance, communicated a similar essential position to the rhetoricians and satirists who explored laughter’s aptitude as a speaker’s magnetic force of charisma. Within the work of poets, chroniclers, and historians, meanwhile, the mystical laughter of prophets, the damnable laughter of sinners, and the expedient laughter of kings may all be read as moments of ecstatic elevation, in which laughter was able to jolt people out of mundane processes or judgments. More practically, it is very telling that Henry’s court writers often gave a moral rationale to the practice of ridiculing political opponents. While theorizing their joking as a type of political maneuvering, they maintained that these frivolities could also evoke for discerning courtiers a profound kind of revelation. When writers in Henry’s circle considered laughter, they saw it as having the capacity to transcend strict procedure by invoking more immediate and charismatic forms of power. In both of these senses, laughter came to be appreciated as something that could essentially combine political ends with more deeply moral dimensions. Within this climate, images of the laughing sanctity of Thomas Becket and the laughing sovereignty of Henry II may be approached as two sides of the same coin. Above all, these two figures both suggested that laughter could be an immense political and moral force. Seen through the hagiographies and miracle collections of the 1170s, Becket’s saintly defiant laughter appears as a distillation

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Between Laughing Saint and Laughing King  181 of laughter’s growing political and religious potential in twelfth-century texts. Reading Garnier’s image of Becket laughing while his head was being skinned, for instance, the late-twelfth-century audience would have understood the idea of a courtly political theater in which laughter could win advancement, could triumph in debates, and could effectively supervene process. Equally, when readers witnessed Henry II laughing to overturn legal judgments or refute prophecies, they would have recognized not only a tactic of political expediency but also a pattern of laughing as a way of signaling a divine intervention in human affairs. The laughter of both the king and the saint, ultimately, embodied a kind of moral power that was a function of political power, and vice versa. How can we explain these wider developments and preoccupations within the  scope of medieval history? What underlying factors drove the changes in opinions, motifs, and concepts of laughter that converged at Henry’s court? It is well known that the twelfth century was a period of exceptional intellectual, social, institutional, and religious change. Equally, we have seen how laughter was ascribed these particular powers during a historical moment in which traditional ideas about the nature of sovereignty and sanctity were becoming fundamentally unstable. Older ideas about the nature of spirituality and sainthood were in the process of being supplanted by new ones in the time of Henry’s reign. After 1150 in particular, hagiographers began emphasizing the role of saints’ bodies and gestures as modes of spiritual purity. Coupled with this, a new culture of spiritual anthropology began to take hold among hagiographers and theological writers, who increasingly imagined physical acts as “reflections of the soul.”1 Laughter’s elevation in Christian thought as a mode of bodily grace can in part be counted as a consequence of this broader movement. Elsewhere, we know that the England of Henry II’s reign witnessed a series of radical shifts in the ideals and mechanisms of kingship and politics. In the age of Henry’s grandfather, Henry I (r.1100–35), political and royal power had most often been respected as an index of aristocratic lineage and military prowess. Partially as a factor of the anarchy of 1135–54, and partially as a product of Henry II’s own questionable aristocratic pedigree, authority in the reign of the new king came to depend far less on these traditional factors. Within this evolving political culture, the arts of intellect and debate emerged as valuable ways of accruing and expressing power. Within such an intensely competitive and unstable climate, it is understandable that laughter managed to become a crucial weapon of political discourse. As the culmination of verbal battling, as a sign of a quicksilver intellect, or as a confirmation that a figure had won supporters at the expense of a rival, the sound of collective laughter at the royal court was really becoming a new kind of mark of high status. 1 André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, translated by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 438–9.

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182  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century A third possible explanation for the emergence of powerful laughter is the injection of classical thought, which came to permeate all manner of twelfthcentury writing. We have seen how the ideas of Aristotle, Horace, and Cicero all shaped new attitudes to laughter in the fields of philosophy, satire, and rhetoric in the 1100s. We know, also, that many of Henry’s court writers were keen to integrate narrative textual techniques from the newly popular works of classical authors such as Valerius Maximus, Macrobius, and especially Suetonius, whose histories paid particular attention to the emotional aspects of character. William of Malmesbury, whose works had an enormous impact on English Latin culture in the 1100s, especially imitated this classical style of anecdotal writing, describing a range of kings and saints as laughing throughout his works. Whether it was a detail in narrative writing or a point of philosophical or ethical reflection, laughter was usually framed in classical texts as a natural, expedient, and useful aspect of being. Without doubt this left a lasting impression on all kinds of writers at Henry’s court and beyond. Yet while these different factors certainly played a role in the texts that were produced at Henry’s court, they can by no means fully explain the particular power of the laughter ascribed to both the king and saint in the works we have seen here. For this we might look deeper into another historical factor that was transforming the essential structures of power and authority in later twelfthcentury England. As we have seen in accounts of Henry’s court circle, what so many writers found powerful about laughter was the way it was able to gesture toward a certain moral and political void in the emerging codes, customs, and rules of Henrician England. Writers consistently showed Becket’s laughter as a sign that he had risen above the fray, for instance by evading the rigid demands of Henry’s constitutions. Similarly, writers were compelled to show King Henry laughing while he was making exceptions to written codes or liberating sovereign power from the logic of strict procedure. Throughout these two kinds of ­situations, the unique appeal of laughter for later twelfth-century observers was that it provided a powerful rejection of verbal logic and explicit rules. Laughter was, in this sense, the perfect response to the culture of bureaucracy that was coming to permeate English politics in the second half of the 1100s. Ultimately, both the laughing saint and the laughing king were images that opposed a dawning culture of political thought with a kind of rebellious charismatic politics that, in relief, appeared to be sublime.

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APPENDIX

Henry’s Courtiers John of Salisbury (d.1180), one of the most accomplished intellectuals of the twelfth ­century, became a regular at the royal court in the late 1150s while conducting affairs for Theobald, the archbishop of Canterbury. He fell out of favor with King Henry by the end of the decade and spent the period from the beginning of 1164 until 1170 in France supporting the cause of the exiled Thomas Becket. As a writer of rare erudition and scope, his contribution to our image of Henry’s court is considerable. Alongside his letters, his major works were his Policraticus and Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum. The Policraticus, finished in 1159 and dedicated to Becket, is an almost encyclopedic compilation of stories and advice for dealing with the demands of being a courtier. Among much else, it includes a number of extended reflections on the perils, ideals, and ethics of laughter. Meanwhile, the two long poems that make up the Entheticus, which was also dedicated to Becket in 1159, reflect John’s disillusionment with the atmosphere of dissimulation and frivolity at court. While the first poem attacks a number of the mid-twelfth century’s emerging intellectual trends, illustrating in the process John’s appreciation of satire as a mode of social critique, the second, shorter poem deals directly with political affairs at the royal court, satirizing the flattering laughter adopted by the king’s familiars. Arnulf of Lisieux (d.1184), a Norman bishop, was not a natural ally of the king. He had supported the rival of Henry II’s mother, King Stephen, for most of the civil war of 1135–54. Nevertheless, Henry chose to keep Arnulf close after his succession to the throne. Educated at Paris in the 1130s, Arnulf had a distinguished episcopal career before he entered the Angevin court. He met the young Henry in 1149, and soon afterwards pledged his full support. Although he was initially much in favor, his relations with the king cooled from the end of the 1150s onwards. Arnulf ’s early centrality in court politics makes him a useful source. He spoke often with the king, and even managed to win him round to his own opinion on a number of occasions. Despite his intimacy with Henry, he also developed a great sympathy for the cause of Thomas Becket. Not only did he offer Thomas advice on how to survive at the royal court, he secretly wrote him in support when the controversy with the king was at its height. His letters attest to a witty and active life at court, even if he ultimately remained something of an outsider. Gilbert Foliot (d.1187) had been a Cluniac abbot and bishop of Hereford until 1163, when Henry personally transferred him to the more politically influential bishopric of London. A fierce supporter of the king during the Becket controversy, Gilbert assumed many of the archbishop’s duties while his rival was in exile. On the subject of laughter, his most ­important contribution was his scathing and derisory letter of 1166, Multiplicem nobis, which ridiculed Becket in blunt terms. Responding to Thomas’s excommunication of a number of English bishops, Gilbert’s letter is a study in caustic satirical style. Gilbert also wrote a number of sermons, which occasionally glossed biblical laughter, and left behind a set of valuable correspondences.

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184  Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century Nigel Wireker (d.c.1198) was a monk at Christ Church, Canterbury, most famous for his satirical work the Speculum stultorum, a searing mockery featuring an ass that studied at the universities of Bologna and Paris but learned only how to say “hee-haw.” Although there is no firm evidence that Nigel had contact with King Henry himself, he seems to have been well known among the court circle. He met Thomas Becket and admired him greatly, and in 1190 wrote a treatise for the new Royal Chancellor, William Longchamp (d.1197), which demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the royal court and its key figures. The Speculum stultorum, written sometime in the 1180s, is particularly useful for its sophisticated and unique theory of satire, the essence of which Nigel made explicit in a prefatory letter. His Tractatus contra curiales, meanwhile, is a useful insight into later court values of laughter and mockery. Bernart de Ventadorn (d.c.1190–1200) was a traveling singer and poet, who spent some part of the 1170s touring with Henry’s entourage. He occasionally wrote songs that addressed the king and his familiars by name, including one that gently mocked Henry for his territorial ambitions. Bernart’s love songs are primarily an insight into erotic images of  laughter current in the twelfth century, although his jokes with Henry also present a valuable snapshot of courtly badinage. Peter of Blois (d.c.1203) was an archdeacon, letter writer, and sometime clerk at the court of Henry II. After his initial training at the school of Chartres, Peter studied at Tours, Paris, and Bologna, during which time he learnt a sharp aptitude for administration and an enviable Latin style. His most important contribution, for the purposes of this project, is his court criticism. He was familiar with the royal court from several angles, serving the archbishop of Canterbury, Richard of Dover (d.1184) for ten years, and spending at least the period from June 1182 to August 1183 working for King Henry. Reflecting on this brief but intense contact with the king, Peter’s elaborate and literary letter collection features a celebrated diatribe against the frivolity of life at Henry’s court. Daniel of Beccles (d.c.1206) is a figure about which almost nothing is known. He says, in his text, that he served at the royal court for two decades, during which time he had contact with King Henry and claims to have learned much of what he knew about manners and etiquette from him. His single work, the Urbanus Magnus, is a long verse guide for behaving properly at court. Along the way, it includes discussions of correct habits of laughter, and more generally lists as one of its key aims the art of cultivating wit (facetia) at court. Walter Map (d.c.1209–10), archdeacon of Hereford, became in the 1180s one of King Henry’s most intimate clerks. Map’s principal surviving work, De nugis curialium, was compiled in the later 1180s, and likely only circulated privately in his lifetime. Regardless of its intended audience, however, the book contains a great number of intimate observations and anecdotes from Walter’s professional life. As he knew Henry personally, the work offers particularly candid details about daily life at court. Walter claimed that his aim in De nugis was to record all the “sayings and doings” from the royal court that had not yet been immortalized in writing, and that he wanted to preserve the things he had heard there that were “more than ordinarily inspiring.” In truth he went far beyond this modest claim. His book, among many other things, presents a compelling defense of satirical laughter as a tool of political discourse, and goes further than its sources in suggesting a vision of laughter as a crucial ingredient of a philosophically sound existence.

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Appendix: Henry ’ s Courtiers  185 Gerald of Wales (d.c.1223) wrote only one of his works while he was actually serving at Henry’s court, yet he remained obsessed with his time there throughout the rest of his life. Much of what he produced in his literary career reflected on the period of 1184–9, when he was a clerk and writer for King Henry. Gerald was an archdeacon who, it was well known to his contemporaries, coveted the bishopric of Saint David’s in Wales. It was a source of great resentment to Gerald when Henry repeatedly snubbed him, giving the position to others instead. His writings are wide ranging, including works of what might be called anthropology, geography, history, autobiography, and also satire.

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206 Bibliography Turner, Ralph V. Eleanor of Aquitaine. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Turner, Victor. “Religious Paradigms and Social Action: Thomas Becket at the Council of Northampton.” In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, 60–96. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Uther, Hans-Jörg. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. 3 vols. FF Communications 284–6. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004. Van Houts, Elisabeth M. C. “The Origins of Herleva, Mother of William the Conqueror.” English Historical Review 101 (1986): 399–405. Vauchez, André. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Verdon, Jean. Rire au Moyen Age. Paris: Perrin, 2001. Vincent, Nicholas. “King Henry II and the Monks of Battle: The Battle Chronicle Unmasked.” In Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry MayrHarting. Edited by Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser, 264–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Vincent, Nicholas. “The Court of Henry II.” In Henry II: New Interpretations. Edited by Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent, 313–14. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007. Vincent, Nicholas. “Did Henry II Have a Policy Towards the Earls?” In War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, c.1150–1500,1–25. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008. Vincent, Nicholas. “Beyond Becket: King Henry II and the Papacy (1154–1189).” In Pope Alexander III: The Art of Survival. Edited by Peter D. Clarke and Anne J. Duggan, 257–99. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Vincent, Nicholas. “William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough: The Manuscripts, Date and Context of the Becket Miracle Collections.” In Hagiographie, idéologie et politique au Moyen Âge en Occident. Edited by Edina Bozoky, 347–88. Turnhout: Brepols, 2012. Ward, John O. “Quintillian and the Rhetorical Revolution of the Middle Ages.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 13:3 (1995): 231–84. Warren, W. L. Henry II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Wehrli, Max. Literatur im deutschen Mittelalter: eine poetologische Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984. Wei, Ian  P.  The Intellectual Culture of Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c.1100–1330. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Weiler, Björn. Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture: England and Germany, c.1215–1250. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Welter, Jean Th. L’Exemplum dans la Littérature Religeuse et Didactique du Moyen Âge. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973. Wesselski, Albert. Mönchslatein. Leipzig: Wilhelm Heims, 1909. Wheeler, Bonnie, and John  C.  Parsons, eds. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Whelan, Fiona. The Making of Manners and Morals in Twelfth-Century England: The Book of the Civilised Man. London: Routledge, 2017. Wilhelmy, Winifried. “Das leise Lachen des Mittelalters – Lächeln, Lachen und Gelächter in den Schriften christlicher Gelehrter (300–1500).” In Seliges Lächeln und höllisches Gelächter: Das Lachen in Kunst und Kultur des Mittlealters. Edited by Winifried Wilhelmy, 38–55. Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2012.

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Bibliography  207 Wilks, Michael. “John of Salisbury and the Tyranny of Nonsense.” In The World of John of Salisbury. Edited by Michael Wilks, 263–87. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. Williams, John  R.  “The Quest for the Author of the Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, 1931–1956.” Speculum 32: 4 (1957): 736–47. Williams, Steven J. The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Wilmart, André. Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin. Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932. Witke, Charles. Latin Satire: The Structure of Persuasion. Leiden: Brill, 1970. Zumthor, Paul, and Marilyn C. Engelhardt. “The Text and the Voice.” New Literary History 1:16 (1984): 67–92. Zupančič, Alenka. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

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General Index Adam of Dryburgh  35 Adam of Eynsham  146, 163 Adrian IV, Pope  4 Aelred of Rievaulx  33, 57–8, 62, 71–2 Alan of Lille  46, 51 Alan of Tewkesbury  99–100, 132 Alberic of Monte Cassino  50 Alexander III, Pope  106–7, 123–4, 159–60 Alexander Neckam  54, 75 Andreas Capellanus  92–4, 98–101 Angevin Empire  13 Anselm of Besate  50 Anselm of Canterbury  28–9, 70 Anselm of Laon  19 Archdeacons 99 Aristotle  6, 42–3, 182 Arnulf of Lisieux  93, 97–8, 100, 103–4, 106–7, 159–60, 183 Art 6–7 Augustine of Hippo  42–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail  8 Bataille, Georges  15–16 Battle Abbey  165–7 Bede 73–4 Benedict of Aniane  27 Benedict of Peterborough  133–8 Bergson, Henri  14–15 Bernard of Angers  136–7 Bernard of Clairvaux  30–3, 55–6, 143–4 Bernard of Nevers  160–1 Bernard Sylvester  75 Bernart de Ventadorn  67, 87–8, 112, 184 Boethius 42–3 Cato 91–2 Charisma  149–50, 177–8, 182 Chivalry 95 Chrétien de Troyes  65–6, 81–2 Cicero  48–9, 180 Cistercian Order  4, 30–7, 55–6, 74, 101–2, 143–4, 155–6, 168 Cluniac Order  101–2 Cnut, King of England  71 Conduct Literature  91–3 Courtliness  9, 90, 102

Daniel of Beccles  3, 91–3, 95–6, 184 Dictionarium papae 17 Edward the Confessor, King of England  60–3, 170–1 Edith, Queen of England  60 Edith of Wilton, Saint  71 Edward Grim  131 Eleanor of Aquitaine  13 Étienne de Fougères  3, 94–6 Facetia, See Wit Faith, Saint  136–7 Francis of Assisi, Saint  8–9, 142–3 Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor  63, 88 Gaimar 78–81 Garnier de Pont–Sainte–Maxence  129–30, 133, 180–1 Geoffrey, Archbishop of York  107–8 Geoffrey of Clairvaux  34 Geoffrey of Monmouth  65–6, 81–2 Geoffrey Ridel  12–13 Gerald of Wales  3, 37–8, 51, 57–8, 67, 89–90, 93, 97–102, 106, 108, 132, 136–7, 153–6, 163, 167, 185 Candidacy for bishopric of St David’s  108, 161 De principis instructione  145, 171 Gemma ecclesiastica  51, 118 On laughter in kingship  153–5, 168 On laughter and law  156–8 Relationship with Henry II  161, 173–5 Satirical theory  117–18 Speculum Duorum  98, 106–7 Gerhoh of Reichersberg  22–3 Gervase of Tilbury  116–17 Gilbert Foliot  35, 98, 125–6, 183 Gilbert of Poitiers  23–4, 44–5 Gilbertus Anglicus  52, 54 Giraut de Borneil  66–7 Glossa Ordinaria 19–22 Godfrey of Cappenburg  63 Goscelin 63 Guibert of Nogent  24, 72

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210  General Index Hagiography  64–7, 128–34 Henry I, King of England  78, 145, 181 Henry II, King of England  1–2, 57, 83–4, 145 Court  3, 12–13, 86, 122–3, 144 Diplomacy 158–65 Emotions and Passions  147–8 Finances  5, 147 Governmental reforms  5, 119–20, 147, 149–50, 176–8, 182 Laughter and Humor  145 Legal reforms  4, 147, 152–3, 176 Relations with the Church  165–9 Quarrel with Thomas Becket  123–4, 160, 164, 167–8, 173 Violence  166, 176 War with his sons  174 Henry of Huntingdon  41–2, 82 Heraclius, Patriarch  167 Herbert of Bosham  131, 142, 160 Hilary of Chichester  99–100, 165–7 Hildebert of Lavardin  23, 71–2 Hildegard of Bingen  52–3 History of Emotions  147–9 Horace  38–40, 111, 182 Hubert Walter  99–100 Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln  112, 146, 161–3, 180 Hugh, Earl of Chester  79–80 Hugh of Nonant  57, 104, 109–11 Hugh Primas  66–7 Hugh of St Victor  29–30 Humour As criticism  111–12 As moral authority  119, 179–80 As a political tool  102–11, 151, 158–65, 180 As revelatory  111–20, 152, 176, 179–80 At Henry II’s court  95–102 Of saints  136–7 Theories of  14–16 Interiority  105–6, 129–30 Invective 106 Isaac of Stella  34, 51–2 Ivo of Chartres  50 Jaufré Rudel  67 Jesters 96–7 John, Bishop of Poitiers  138–9 John of Cornwall  45–6 John de Hauteville  41–2 John of Fruttaria  26 John of Salisbury  3, 18–19, 37–8, 51, 86, 91–3, 98–101, 104–5, 183 Biography of Thomas Becket  129 Entheticus  104–5, 114–15, 126, 172 Metalogicon 115

Relationship with Henry II  172–3 Relationship with Thomas Becket  125–6 Satirical theory  114–15 Jordan Fantosme  147–8 Juvenal 39–41 King Arthur  83–4, 170–1 King Herod  173 Lanfranc of Bec  74 Language  99–100, 107–8 Laughter Definitions 12 In art  6–7 In diplomacy  93, 97, 158–65, 180 In love  66–9, 94 In metamorphosis  74–5 In miracles  133–8 In poetry  66–7 In politics  9, 77–84, 145, 180 In preaching  6–7, 51 In resurrections  134–5 Mystical  19–20, 25, 29, 32–7, 61–2, 67–70, 131, 140–1, 144, 170, 179–80 Of Christ  34, 45–7, 55–6 Of God  21, 66–7 Of heaven  66 Of hell  73–4 Of martyrs  64–5, 132–3 Of saints  63–5, 123, 138–44 Of women  7–8, 95–6 Of youth  96 Prophetic  60–3, 65–6, 131–2, 169–71 Punishment for  69–76, 109–11, 135–6, 145–6, 172–5 Law  147, 152–8 Lawrence of Durham  66 Lawrence of Rome, Saint  34–7, 64, 139–42 Louis VI, King of France  83–4 Louis VII, King of France  88, 164 Louis IX, King of France  59 Luke de la Barre  145–6 Marie de France  82 Matthew of Vendôme  57 Maurus of Salerno  52 Medicine  51–6, 138 Merlin 65–6 Misogyny 100–1 Moralium Dogma Philosophorum  150–1, 176 Nigel Wireker  26, 64, 82, 86, 104–6, 109, 184 Passio Sancti Laurentii 139–42 Relationship with Thomas Becket  112–13, 141–2

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General Index  211 Satirical theory  112–13 Speculum stultorum 113 Tractatus contra curiales 109–10 Odo of Canterbury  139–40 Orderic Vitalis  72–3, 78–9, 145–6 Osbert of Clare  61–2 Ovid 75 Paris, University of  3–4, 19, 22, 48, 50, 98–9, 112–13, 123–4 Persius 38 Peter Abelard  22–3, 43–4 Peter of Blois  3, 41–2, 96–7, 100–1, 104–6, 110, 118, 184 Peter of Celle  41 Peter the Chanter  40, 46–8 Peter Damian  26 Peter Lombard  22, 45–6 Peter the Venerable  30 Pionius of Smyrna  64–5 Porphyry 42–3 Puns 100 Quintillian  49–50, 180 Rabanus Maurus  52 Ralph Diceto  83–4, 103 Ranulf de Broc  122–3 Ranulf de Glanvill  12–13 Reginald of Durham  71–2 Reputation  106–11, 118–19 Rhetoric  48–51, 150–1, 180 Rhys ap Gruffydd  97 Richard I, King of England  171 Richard de Lucy  12–13 Richard FitzNigel  158 Richard of St Victor  24 Robert of Arbrissel  27–8 Robert of Beaumont  12–13 Robert of Cricklade  74–5, 92–3, 96, 132 Robert Partes  124 Roger, Archbishop of York  111–12 Roger, Bishop of Worcester  111–12, 161–2 Roger of Howden  51–2, 98 The Rule of St Benedict 26–7 Salerno, Medical School of  52–3 Satire  37–42, 111–20 Secretum Secretorum 53–4 Serlo of Wilton  51–2 Sermons  23, 142 Smaragadus of Saint–Mihiel  27 Smiling  12, 133–4, 142–3, 170–1 Social mobility  90, 98–9, 181

Stephen, King of England  80–1 Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury  142 Stephen of Rouen  170–1 Suetonius  78, 80, 84–5, 182 Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis  83–4 Svein II Estridsson, King of Denmark  61–2 Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury  123–4 Thierry of Chartres  50 Thomas Aquinas  6 Thomas Becket  2, 22, 83–4, 86, 98, 104–8, 121 Advice received on arriving at Henry II’s court  86, 106–7, 126 Appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury 123–4 Biographies 128 Character 123–4 Friendship with Henry II  163–4 Exile from Henry II’s court  107, 123–6, 160, 164 Humor  124–8, 137–8 Martyrdom  123–4, 132–4, 142, 160 Miracle collections  128–9, 133–8, 169–70 Transformation of character  122, 130–1 Thomas, Prince of Louvain  82 Troubadours  66–7, 69–70 Twelfth–Century Renaissance  3–4 Valerius Maximus  57, 153–4 Victor IV, Antipope  159–60 Wace 81 Walter of Châtillon  41–2 Walter Map  3, 37–8, 42, 89–90, 98, 100–2, 105, 107–8, 111–12, 184 De nugis curialium  116–18, 184 Relationship with Henry II  155–6, 168 Satirical theory  115–17 Weeping 13–14 Werburgh, Saint  63 Westminster Abbey  61–2 William I (the Conqueror), King of England  80–1, 146 William II (Rufus), King of England  69–70, 73, 76–81, 173–4 William of Canterbury  130–8, 169–70 William FitzStephen  129, 141 William Longchamp  86, 104–6, 109–11 William of Malmesbury  61, 69–71, 73, 76–7 William of Pavia  125 William of St Thierry  32–3 William de Trahinac  152, 176 Wit (facetia)  94–5, 109, 138 Ysengrimus 82–3