A cultural history of humour

Humor and history; Jokes, jokers and jokebooks in ancient greek culture; Cicero, Plautus and roman laughter; Laughter in the Middle Ages; Bakhtin and his theory of carnival; Fronteirs of the comic in early modern Italy; The comic and the counter-reformation in the Spanish Netherlands; Prose Jest-Books mainly in the sixteenth to eighteenth centureis in England; To converse agreeably: civility and the telling of jokes in seventeenth-century Holland; How was Jan Steen Funny? Strategies and functions of comic painting in the seventeenth century; Parliamentary Hilarity inside the French constitutional assembly 1789-1791; Humour and the public sphere in nineteenth-century Germany; Humour, laughter and the field; reflections from anthropology