Poetik Des Lachens: Untersuchungen Zum Mittelhochdeutschen Roman Um 1200

This book deals with the phenomenon of laughter in Middle High German literature around 1200. Whereas the church condemned laughter and shaped poetics and rhetoric of the era with this attitude, the romances developed their own poetics of laughter, which this study seeks to illuminate without recourse to modern comic theory. Based on the analysis of individual examples such as Lanzelet by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven and Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, laughter becomes recognizable as a constitutive element of Middle High German epics.