Part I: Preliminaries: terms and theories
1. Introduction - Daniel Derrin2. The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the limits of Method- Conal Condren3. No Sense of Humour? 'Humour' Words in Old Norse- Hannah Burrows 4. Rewriting Laughter in Early Modern Europe- Lucy Rayfield5. The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions- Rebecca Tierney-Hynes 6. Bergson's Theory of the Comic and its Applicability to Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy- Jessica Milner Davis 7. Comic Character and Counter-violation: Critiquing Benign Violation Theory- Daniel Derrin 8. Humour and Religion: New Directions?- Richard A. Gardner
Part II: Case studies
9. Visual Humour on Greek Vases (550-350 BC): Three Approaches to the Ambivalence of Ugliness in Popular Culture- Alexandre Mitchell 10. Approaching Jokes and Jestbooks in Premodern China- Giulia Baccini 11. Testing the Limits of Pirandello's Umorismo: a Case Study Based on Xiaolin Guangji- Antonio Leggieri 12. The Monsters that Laugh Back: Humour as a Rhetorical Apophasis in Medieval Monstrology- Rafal Boryslawski 13. Medieval Jokes in Serious Contexts: Speaking Humour to Power- Martha Bayless 14. 'Lightness and Maistrye': Herod, Humour and Temptation in Early English Drama- Jamie Beckett15. Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities- Alison Williams16. Na鴳e Parody in Rabelais- John Parkin17. 'By God's Arse': Genre, Humour and Religion in William Wager's Moral Interludes- Lieke Stelling18. Romantic Irony: Problems of Interpretation in Schlegel and Carlyle- Giles Whiteley 19. Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japanese Cartoons- Ronald Stewart 20. Popular Humour in Nordic Jesting Songs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Danish Recordings of Oral Song Tradition- Lene Halskov Hansen 21. Spanish Flu: The First Modern Case of Viral Humour?- Nikita Lobanov
Part III: Humour of the Past in the Present
22. Translating Humour in The Song of Roland- John DuVal 23. Intercultural and Interartistic Transfers of Shandean Humour in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries- Yen-Mai Tran-Gervat 24. The Scholars, Chronique indiscr鋈e or Neoficial'naja istorija? The challenge of Translating Eighteenth-century Chinese Irony and Grotesque for Contemporary Western Audiences- Anna Di Toro 25. Putting Humour on Display- Laurence Grove26. Building The Old Joke Archive- Bob Nicholson and Mark Hall
