Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature. Ed. Jonathan Wilcox. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. vii + 162. $75; £40.

In the 1940s, Charles Jones and Ernst Curtius pointed skeptically to passages that looked very much like humor in early medieval literature, but that appeared in devotional contexts (e.g., saints' lives and martyrdoms) that are presumably not supposed to condone humor. Furthermore, readers have long been unsure whether the Anglo-Saxons considered their litotes-which we find so delightful, and which we can't help but associate with wry English wit-as being initially as sportive as they seem to us. Wilcox's introduction and the eight essays in his collection provide the means by which we can situate these problems in linguistic, sociological, and psychoanalytic frameworks, and so begin to answer some longstanding questions.

Peter Dendle
Pennsylvania State University, Mont Alto