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https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/359
Title: | Street-life in Constantinople: Women and the Carnivalesque | Contributor(s): | Garland, L (author) | Publication Date: | 2006 | Handle Link: | https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/359 | Abstract: | The existence of humour in Byzantium still appears surprising to the modern scholarly mind. Humour - a phenomenon which can include a variety of behaviour intended to produce smiles of laughter in an audience or readership - is the ultimate unorthodoxy, with its implications of mockery, lack of respect or restraint, reversal of roles, and evasion of social and/or political control. This is especially the case as so much Byzantine humour, like its classical predecessors, was based on mockery, abuse and humiliation - subjects like defecation, obscenity, physical violence, ritual humiliation, insults, and heavy sexual innuendo are rampant in the twelfth century, if not earlier (Garland 1990b; 1999b; Haldon 2002a, 2002b). To the Byzantines themselves, laughter was generally considered not only vulgar, but licentious and impious: just as Jesus, in the Gospel tradition, is never recorded as indulging in laughter, so saints, for example, are rarely if ever described as laughing - though they occasionally indulge in a smile which characterises their apatheia, their lack of concern with humanity's passions and desires. | Publication Type: | Book Chapter | Source of Publication: | Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800-1200, p. 163-176 | Publisher: | Ashgate Publishing | Place of Publication: | Aldershot, United Kingdom | ISBN: | 9780754657378 | Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: | 210306 Classical Greek and Roman History | HERDC Category Description: | B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book | Publisher/associated links: | http://books.google.com.au/books?id=T4eMlP3nV4YC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA163 | Editor: | Editor(s): Lynda Garland |
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Appears in Collections: | Book Chapter |
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