 | Treatise On Laughter Laurent Joubert (b. 1529) was an important figure in the medical world of the French Renaissance. His monumental Treatise on Laughter provides categories and examples of the laughable. The work describes laughter, its causes and effects, its types and differences. His subdivisions and categories, along with their examples, furnish today's critic and reader with a Renaissance vision of comic commonplaces. It is this vision that may prove to be of great value in analyzing comic literature of the Renaissance. Laurent Joubert (1529-1582) was a French physician who became a significant figure in a movement that sought to challenge medical superstitions and ignorance in France. Busy as he was with the obligations of his practice, Joubert found time to compose several medical works. He wrote voluminously in Latin and in French, edited the important Grande Chirurgie of Guy de Chauliac, and published his Erreurs populaires to considerable scandal. Three years before his death Joubert published his first written and most cherished work, the Traité du Ris , or Treatise on Laughter . Gregory David de Rocher is an editor and translator of many volumes, including Popular Errors , The Second Part of the Popular Errors , and Rabelais's Laughers and Joubert's Traité du Ris . He currently resides in Athens, Georgia. |
