Professorial Lectures 'The House of Mirth: the ethics of laughter and ridiculous Gothic art', Professor Alixe Bovey, FSA FRHistS, Executive Dean and Deputy Director

Medieval art frequently juxtaposes sacred texts and spaces with witty, satirical, silly, and sometimes arrestingly crude images. Nuns dance barefoot, foxbishops preach to their prey, and disembodied bottoms trumpet in stained glass, sculpture, and the margins of books that contain scripture, prayers, and liturgy.

From the time that they were made, such images have provoked amusement and bemusement, ire and iconoclasm. They have found new admirers in the instagram age, harpplaying donkeys and knights riding chickens offering radicallydecontextualised microjolts of dopamine to doomscrollers.

Responding to the ideas of other scholars (including Huizinga, Bakhtin, Eco, Randall, Camille, Binski, Sandler and Jones) who have considered seriously the comical medieval image, this lecture surveys the problem of laughter in medieval art. It sets intentionally ridiculous Gothic images in the context of biblical ambivalence about laughter; medieval preachers’ understanding of the rhetorical power of comedy; and Thomas Aquinas’s attempt to reconcile canonical Christian authorities’ views on mirth with Aristotle.

With a particular focus on visual humour in the places where Thomas lived and worked during his lifetime (c.12251274), this lecture explores how Thomas’s laughter ethics might relate to the play of images around him. With AristotelianThomistic laughter in mind, it then considers the implications of visual jokes originally conceived by and for small, elite groups in the Middle Ages as they reach a mass audience on social media today.