Celebrating the work of Brian J. Levy in the realm of comedy and humour in the Middle Ages, this collection of twenty essays explores unusual, unexpected or unacknowledged elements of humour in medieval literature and art. Scholars from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the USA, Denmark, and the Netherlands consider comic elements taking an unusual form; a comic presence in unexpected places; comic elements intentionally / unintentionally hidden; comic elements surprisingly vaunted; a comic presence in standard contexts which stands out for a particular reason; comic elements which are for some reason controversial; comic elements as yet unidentified or unacknowledged; a commonly acknowledged comic presence which is in fact no such thing. Essays in English and French deal with a broad range of subjects. If the Roman de Renart is particularly well represented amongst these essays, other subjects make up the majority of the book. These include: Cicero's De Oratorei; the Mannekin pis; late medieval wall paintings; German and French Drama; fabliaux; vernacular pious tales and dits; the romance epic Richard Coeur de Lyon; Les Quinze joyes de mariage; bestiaries; and misericords. Sometimes shocking, often surprising, and always intriguing, the medieval comic presence rarely corresponds to our expectations and assumptions. This book shows that in numerous cases the medieval joke is actually on the modern scholar.

This is the first Old French-English dictionary of its kind to provide a comprehensive reference tool for a broad range of English-speaking users. In the form of a compendious but manageable single volume, it is designed for both the general and specialist reader of Old French texts including students, scholars, philologists and historians. The dictionary is based on a large and varied number of texts up to c.1350, starting from the 'classics' of medieval French literature and extending through all the genres: epic, romance, religious, moral, didactic and allegorical texts, lyric poetry, drama, humour and satire, as well as non-literary historical, political and legal documents. The aim has been to include a wide range of variant spellings as well as the main dialectal forms to help the anglophone user in particular. Detailed definitions and grammatical functions are provided, together with common phrases with their translations.

This is the first Old French-English dictionary of its kind to provide a comprehensive reference tool for a broad range of English-speaking users including students, scholars, philologists and historians. This manageable, single-volume, dictionary is based on a large and varied number of texts up to ca. 1350, starting from the "classics" of medieval French literature and extending through all the genres: epic, romance, religious, moral, didactic and allegorical texts, lyric poetry, drama, humor and satire, as well as nonliterary historical, political and legal documents.