“This is a minstrel telling his audience, perhaps people of very different social standing, to get drunk and be merry with each other,” Wade said. Most of the collection is not digitized or only partially. (Note that this site only includes those manuscripts that are fully digitized. The sermon addresses the audience as “cursed creatures” and includes fragments from drinking songs. Delve into the literature, art, history, music, philosophy, and theology of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Western Europe found in Houghton Librarys collection. Wade said that one scene is reminiscent of Monty Python’s “Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog” sketch. In medieval times, when the art was at its height, specialization within scriptoria or workshops called for differentiation between those who historiated (i.e. The Hunting of the Hare is a poem about peasants, “full of jokes and absurd hijinks”.
To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.” “Here we have a self-made entertainer with very little education creating really original, ironic material. “He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” Wade said. Wade believes the minstrel wrote part of his act down because its many nonsense sequences would have been extremely difficult to recall. They were copied circa 1480 by Richard Heege, a household cleric and tutor to a Derbyshire family called the Sherbrookes, from a now lost memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel performing near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border.
The texts consist of a tail-rhyme burlesque romance entitled The Hunting of the Hare, a mock sermon in prose and an alliterative nonsense verse The Battle of Brackonwet. Standup comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.” It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. “Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art,” he continued. Wade, from Cambridge’s English faculty and Girton College, said that most “medieval poetry, song and storytelling has been lost”. Dr James Wade: ‘To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.’ Photograph: University of Cambridge
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