Epilogue. “Those Days Are Over”? Inhabiting a Tradition

Abstract

What do Enite’s treacherous smile, Isolde’s fake virtue, or the medieval fetish for smiling red lips tell the modern reader? Why should it matter how these imaginary heroines laugh, they who did not even exist except in the minds of their authors? Laughter and smiling are basic human responses that despite continuous study remain elusive, always raising new questions about their origins, meanings, functions, and universality. One way we can explore these issues is by studying textual laughter. As Sebastian Coxon points out, fictional texts serve as a window—albeit an indirect one—onto social reality. They contribute to a critical discussion of the culture that engendered them and do so “through the imaginative realization of certain values and principles of behavior recognizable and comprehensible to a contemporary audience.” The red-lipped smiles of medieval literary beauties uncover a society that walks a tightrope between the patristic rejection of laughter and its Aristotelian acceptance as an inherently human expression; between the ecclesiastical removal of joy to the afterlife and the courtly ethos that treats it as an indicator of harmonious existence on earth; and between the threat of social intercourse to female chastity and the need for affability and seduction to guarantee smooth interactions between the sexes. The very variety and sheer number of texts discussed in this book and collected in Table 1 in the appendix bespeaks the impressive discursive heterogeneity of this period. Laughter is examined from starkly different angles: theological, clericaldidactic, natural-philosophical, secular courtly, and obscene carnivalesque.