The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030566463
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Conclusions: The Sense of the Humour of Medieval Monsters

Published in the year 2000, Umberto Eco’s Baudolino is a novel which provides an anthropological commentary on the perennial allure and importance of monstrosities in their terrifying and humorous dimensions. Its eponymous protagonist and narrator is a twelfth-century incurable liar whose stories gain lives of their own and are impossible to be distinguished from the truth. After other earlier adventures, Baudolino reflects on his journey to find the legendary Prester John, the alleged author of an epistolary tale of wonders addressed to the pope and circulating in Western Europe around 1165.39 Eco’s Baudolino takes us to the domains of medieval legends and fantastic races, and travels to the world of the fabled East, meeting many of the creatures and representatives of the races recognisable from the Liber monstrorum. As may be expected, it is Baudolino who is fantastic, terrifying and amusing to them and it is him who is expected by Deacon Johannes, their leader, to share with him the tales of what is marginal to their world, that is the tales of the Wonders of the West. In so doing, Baudolino reverses the world familiar to us into a vision which is true, yet which is also as grotesque, as full of bafflement, mystery, but also of terror and humour, as the Liber monstrorum and other similar medieval narratives.40 It is also as imaginative as the inventiveness of a storyteller allows:

I tried to make him [Deacon Johannes] live through my tales. And I may also have invented: […] I told him of the wonders of the lands where the sun dies […] [of] a fish the size of a mountain, capable of swallowing a whole ship, but I had to explain to him what ships were, fish made of wood that cleave the waves, while moving white wings; I listed for him the wondrous animals of my country […] the ladybug, which is like a small mushroom, red and dotted with milk-colored spots […] the oyster, a living jewel box that sometimes produces a dead beauty but of inestimable value, the nightingale that keeps vigil singing and lives worshiping the rose, the lobster, a loricate monster of a flame-red color, who flees backwards to escape the hunters who dote on its flesh, the eel, frightful aquatic serpent with a fatty, exquisite flavor, the seagull, that flies over the waters as if it were an angel of the Lord.41

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