Comedy and Culture

Comedy and Culture examines the ways on which the culture and society of the Middle Ages impacted on the works of the Sienese poet, Cecco Angiolieri (c.1260-1312). It analyses how Angiolieri's poetry conformed to medieval notions and practices of comicality. The study explores the means by which Cecco satirized important cultural movements of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, such as love literature and the ascendant Franciscan order. In addition, it looks at his relations with other writers of the day, including his three insulting sonnets addressed to Dante Alighieri. Comedy and Culture demonstrates that Angiolieri was not an isolated, bizarre' figure, as some early twentieth-century scholars have described him, but rather an author in step with his times.