Self-Referring Deformities: Humour in Early Modern Sermon Literature

Abstract

Few studies have addressed comprehensively the place of jesting in early modern pulpit rhetoric. This essay documents some of the humourjests and witty speechin the period's extant sermon literature. Specifically it identifies the analytical potential of revisiting an ancient, and early modern, idea: that the laughable is a kind of deformitas (deformity). A standard approach in studies of humour from the early modern period has been to identify 'scorn' as its centraI emotional category. However, with reference especially to the sermons of Hugh Latimer in the 1540s and Thomas Adams in the first decades of the seventeenth century, I shall argue that scorn for what is deemed other, and therefore 'low', does not exhaust the range of affective rhetoric achieved by jests against 'deformities' in sermons. Pulpit jesting also generates what are called here 'self-referring' laughable deformities, with much more complex affective purposes.

Laughing at Hypocrisy: The Turncoats (1711), Visual Culture and Dissent in Early Eighteenth-Century England

“…91 Laughter of this sort was used in sermons to convey the superiority of one religious faction over another, to level scorn at stereotypes in jestbooks and plays, and to bind communities together against perceived others. 92 Relief theories present laughter as a release of pent-up mental and physical tensions. Laughter's reviving properties were widely noted in early modern Europe.…”