This book traces the development of religious comedy and leverages that history to justify today’s uses of religious humor in all of its manifestations, including irreverent jokes. It argues that regulating humor is futile and counterproductive, illustrating this point with a host of comedic examples. Humor is a powerful rhetorical tool for those who advocate and for those who satirize religious ideals. The book presents a compelling argument about the centrality of humor to the story of Western Christianity’s cultural and artistic development since the Middle Ages, taking a multi-disciplinary approach that combines literary criticism, religious studies, philosophy, theology, and social science. After laying out the conceptual framework in Part 1, Part 2 analyzes key works of religious comedy across the ages from Dante to the present, and it samples the breadth of contemporary religious humor from Brad Stine to Robin Williams, and from Monty Python to South Park. Using critical, historical, and conceptual lenses, the book exposes and overturns past attempts by church authorities, scholars, and commentators to limit and control laughter based on religious, ideological, or moral criteria. This is a unique look into the role of humor and comedy around religion. It will, therefore, appeal to readers interested in multiple fields of inquiry, including religious studies, humor studies, the history of ideas, and comparative literature.

Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dante’s masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectives—polemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city or institution— that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scholarly examination of the connection between this medieval invective tradition, and its elements of humor, derision, and reprehension in Dante’s Comedy. This book argues that these comic texts are rooted in and actively engaged with the social, political, and religious conflicts of their time. Political invective has a dynamic ethical orientation that is mediated by a humor that disarms excessive hostility against its individual targets, providing an opening for dialogue. While exploring medieval comic poems by Rustico Filippi (from Florence), Cecco Angiolieri (from Siena), and Folgore da San Gimignano, this study unveils new biographical data about these poets retrieved from Italian state archives (most of these data are published here in English for the very first time), and ultimately shows what the medieval invective tradition can add to our understanding of Dante’s Comedy.

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A retelling of the Divine Comedy for our Modern Age with notes and illustrations by the authors. Dante's Inferno retold upon a modern stage with accompanying annotations and illustrations. Second edition, celebrating 710 years since Inferno road. A comedy.With gracious thanks to all who contributed and tellers of all tall tales, most especially Dante Alighieri [himself] and his many translators.

David Dean Brockman connects spirituality with psychoanalysis throughout this book as he looks at Dante’s early writings, his life story and his "polysemous" classical poem The Divine Comedy. Dante wanted to create a document that would educate the common man about his journey from brokenness to growth and a solid integration of body, self, and soul. This book draws the resemblance between Dante’s poem and the "journey" that patients experience in psychoanalytic therapy. It will be the first total treatment of Dante’s work in general, and The Divine Comedy in particular, using the psychoanalytic method. This fascinating study of Dante’s The Divine Comedy will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists, as well as those still in training. Academics and students of psychology, spirituality, religion, and literature may also be interested in Brockman’s in-depth study of Dante’s work.

The bond between love and death has long been recognised as a defining characteristic of the elegies of Propertius, but scholars have rarely clarified how or to what degree Propertius differed from other love poets in associating these themes. In this book, Dr Papanghelis traces the radical way in which Propertius dealt with amorous and morbid fantasies in his poems. He argues that the modes of erotic expression used in the elegies are fundamentally unconventional, to the point that the definitions of love and death are interdependent. This book offers a detailed reading of some of the most stimulating and problematic of Propertius' elegies, offering fresh insight on the question of the poet's sensuous temperament and the significance of the love-death relationship in his works.