[HN Gopher] A medieval comedy act has been discovered in first-e...
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       A medieval comedy act has been discovered in first-ever find,
       researcher says
        
       Author : isaacfrond
       Score  : 73 points
       Date   : 2023-06-01 11:20 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
        
       | baerrie wrote:
       | I saw a medieval comedy with a killer rabbit when i was a
       | kid...by some troupe known as "Monty Python"
        
       | skippyboxedhero wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | meepmorp wrote:
         | Please don't.
        
         | hungryhungryhun wrote:
         | If you want to make racist jokes or not see the new kids movie
         | with the native american lead, just do so.
        
           | rippercushions wrote:
           | Where do you see the previous poster bring racist? If
           | anything, he is being anti-racist by calling out the
           | structural inequity of medieval society.
        
       | PcChip wrote:
       | is there a link to the actual manuscript?
        
         | a_shoeboy wrote:
         | Here's the Hunting of the Hare (starts on the page marked 113
         | and it's in Middle English, but there's a glossary after):
         | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236869902_'The_Hunt...
        
       | soneca wrote:
       | I was expecting to read the text. :(
        
         | thedailymail wrote:
         | The academic paper has quite a bit more detail. The link to it
         | in the Vice article seems to be broken, but it's available
         | (open access!) on the journal website.
         | 
         | https://academic.oup.com/res/advance-article/doi/10.1093/res...
        
         | ilyt wrote:
         | It's vice, any expectation is too high for them
        
           | stronglikedan wrote:
           | Even solvency, apparently.
        
         | coldpie wrote:
         | Some better information in this article:
         | https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/23557334.librar...
         | 
         | The manuscript itself seems to be available here:
         | https://digital.nls.uk/early-manuscripts/browse/archive/1336...
         | 
         | I freely admit I cannot read it :)
        
           | lstamour wrote:
           | Interesting. The table of contents is rewritten in modern
           | cursive, though I can't read everything even there.
           | Contents       The Hunttinge of the Hare.       A Mock
           | Sermon.       ...
           | 
           | From there we can flip forward to the actual content and ...
           | yep, can't read it. Honestly the only reason I know it says
           | "huntinge of the hare" centred at the top is because I read
           | it in the table of contents.
           | 
           | I can tell it's English, but that's about all I can tell, and
           | that only because I can read some of the words, but not all
           | of them. :) Maybe I can send the image to GPT-4 for
           | transcription and translation. (lol)
        
             | Izkata wrote:
             | Looks like a Gothic font with spelling differences, I think
             | the first line translated is something like:
             | 
             | > (something) tale I will now tell
             | 
             | Except the spelling is like:
             | 
             | > (something) take y wyll yow tell
             | 
             | I can also read what seems to be "me to blame" on the 6th
             | line.
        
               | jacobolus wrote:
               | ? letyll tale y wyll yow tell       y troye hit wyll lyke
               | yow well        that ye shall habe snd same ooooo
               | ?ot ?? it was the da? not say       for appyr.??ly a nod?
               | day       hit myself(?) t?ne me to blame ooooooo
               | ??ow take snd hede eny?hon       how a yomon come rydyng
               | alon       hafull fayve may he fond ooooooo       he
               | lokud ke syde hym lys?t slydand       he fond a hare(?)
               | full fay? syttand       a pon a falow h?nd ooooooooo
               | he markyd wyll wher the fatt th       thkyd to the town
               | as fast as he myght go       th way then con he ha?
               | ooooooo       ...
               | 
               | I think the y with dot over is "the", but there seems to
               | be a distinction between y and th so I'm not entirely
               | sure what all the abbreviations are supposed to be.
        
             | poglet wrote:
             | If you take a screen capture then paste it into google
             | image search then select the text or translate button - it
             | also detects the English characters, but still makes very
             | little sense to me.
        
             | alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
             | I think the table of content is modern. It says "rebound in
             | 1964" after all.
             | 
             | This is what seems to be the first page of the text
             | https://digital.nls.uk/early-
             | manuscripts/browse/archive/1341...
             | 
             | I recognize latin characters in what my classmates called
             | "gothic font" in highschool. But I can't recognize the
             | language.
        
       | greenhearth wrote:
       | This is no surprise. There's a lot of Monty Python style in
       | Shakespeare, and he was definitely influenced by earlier sources,
       | such as medieval morality plays, etc.
        
         | dsr_ wrote:
         | Perhaps we should say that Monty Python draws on Shakespearean
         | comedy, given the relative times and the fact that we know that
         | most, if not all of the Pythons studied Shxpr.
        
       | geocrasher wrote:
       | And thus it was proved true that an artists value isn't known
       | until they are dead.
       | 
       | In this case, it took six centuries for somebody to get their
       | jokes.                  and for those who don't get *my* humor,
       | it's a play on words about 'getting' jokes, physically, in
       | written form
        
       | heywhatupboys wrote:
       | IN BRITAIN!
       | 
       | I think some of the posts on here are very anglo-centric. I like
       | that HN is a place that serves no one particlar nation or people.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | andrewxdiamond wrote:
         | As a noob asking from a place of curiosity, does "Medieval"
         | mean anything outside of the Europe sphere of influence?
         | Medieval evokes a certain imagery in my mind, rather than a
         | time period. It feels weird and Eurocentric to refer to Asian
         | countries in ~1200 as "Medieval" for example.
        
           | nemo wrote:
           | "Medieval" can sometimes be applied to places like China or
           | India, but it's not used that way by historians. In general
           | historians don't use the terms "Medieval" or "Dark Ages" much
           | anymore, and if they do it's with qualifiers. For Europe
           | "Post-Classical," "Early Middle Ages" or "Late Antiquity" are
           | more often used refer to the earlier Middle Ages.
        
           | senkora wrote:
           | The general term is the Post-classical Era.
           | 
           | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-classical_history
        
         | jahewson wrote:
         | Medieval refers to a specific European time period, I'm not
         | sure what you expected.
         | 
         | > Minstrels were fixtures of European life in the Middle Ages,
         | but though countless references to these entertainers exist in
         | literature from this era, no clear records of an actual
         | minstrel's "repertoire," meaning their act or set, has been
         | identified--until now.
         | 
         | What's not to like?
        
           | anthk wrote:
           | Also most of Europe had similar jokes both from books and
           | trovadours.
        
       | mongol wrote:
       | Got me thinking... what is the oldest, preserved joke? Is it
       | still funny?
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | The oldest recorded joke[0], as recorded on a Sumerian tablet
         | somewhere between 1900 and 2300 BC:                   Something
         | which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman
         | did not fart on her husband's lap.
         | 
         | [0]https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/09/oldest-
         | know...
        
           | anyfoo wrote:
           | An intellectual was told by someone: "your beard is now
           | coming in." So he went to the rear-entrance and waited for
           | it. Another intellectual asked what he was doing. Once he
           | heard the whole story, he said: "I'm not surprised that
           | people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it's
           | not coming in by the other gate?"
           | 
           | Most of them suck by today's standards, but that one is
           | genuinely still funny today!
        
         | annoyingnoob wrote:
         | https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/04/24/earliest-gag/
        
       | drewcoo wrote:
       | In medieval England people joked about killer rabbits. Must be a
       | direct ancestor of Monty Python's rabbit - connection!
       | 
       | In medieval England there was a sketch about "Robin Hood,
       | jousting bears, and partying pigs" yet there's no mention of Walt
       | Disney.
       | 
       | I'd say it's a load of hogwash but I'm sure somewhere Becky
       | Ferreira has written about how medieval Britons used to bathe
       | their swine.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-01 23:00 UTC)