In this discerning contribution to medieval and early modern drama studies, which will interest specialists in those areas as well as theater scholars, Noah D. Guynn contests traditional interpretations of farce that deem the genre too vulgar, childish, and formulaic to merit extensive critical attention. Seeking to rescue these comedies—with their stereotypical characters, predictable plots, and seemingly gratuitous scatology—from the “trash bin of history” (224), Guynn argues that early French farces are neither intellectually vacuous bagatelles nor harmless safety valves for the underclasses’ resentments. In his materialist, socio-aesthetic study of little-known exemplars of the genre, as well as the famous Farce de Maître Pathelin, the author explores the texts’ social and aesthetic complexities and slippages; examines their intertextual resonances, which imbue the works with religious, political, and sociological significance; and attempts to reconstruct the myriad, and oftentimes nonhegemonic, ways that medieval and early modern audiences would have responded to the farces. Drawing upon biblical and patristic intertexts, as well as poststructuralist, anthropological, feminist, and queer theories, and a close and supple reading of the farces themselves, the author argues compellingly that the comedies at once reflected and helped shape popular religious beliefs, real-world family dynamics, and the dialectics of domination and submission in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France.

In his introduction (“The Many Faces of Farce”) Guynn adopts the guidon of La Mère Folle de Dijon, a festive theatrical society, as both the emblem of his monograph and a lens for visualizing early French farce. The guidon displays an unmasked woman with three fols, or bellows, on the obverse, and two twisted acrobats wearing foolscaps and lowered breeches—one holding the other upside down while farting into his companion's nose—on the reverse. By virtue of the “four winds of the heaven” (Dan. 7:2), one positioned at each corner, that swirl around the fools, the guidon reminds readers that “scatological foolishness [can] conjure eschatological truths” (5).

In chapter 1 (“The Wisdom of Farts”) Guynn analyzes three sixteenth-century plays (the Norman farce Le gentilhomme et Naudet, Pierre Gringoire's Le jeu du Prince des Sotz et de la Mere Sotte, and the Rouennais morality play Le Ministre de l'Eglise) while drawing upon archival records and eyewitness testimonies to reconstruct both the “hidden transcripts” of, and likely real-world responses to, these productions (23). Far from confirming established values, he contends, the plays encourage “plural reading” (23) and participatory engagement by audiences, who would have recognized and reacted to the farces’ oscillation between resistance and conformity in matters of religion, politics, and household governance. Chapter 2 (“A Justice to Come”) focuses on justice, messianism, and eschatology in La Farce de Maître Pathelin, showing how the text uses discursive ambiguities, scriptural intertexts, and sacred parody to interrogate “ossified value systems” (71), while challenging spectators to imagine better forms of justice than those satirized in the play. Guynn turns again to sacred parody in chapter 3 (“Sacraments and Scatology”) as he examines the theatricality of sacerdotal ritual and the dialectics of faith and doubt in Andrieu de La Vigne's Mystère de Saint Martin, a morality play accompanied by two irreverent farces that establish an ambivalent dialogue with the mystery play. Chapter 4 (“Making History”) delves into the sexual politics of farce through the analysis of queer bodies, cross-dressing, women on top, and the ambiguity of gendered attributes in two early sixteenth-century comedies (Serre Porte et Fin Verjus and Le poulier à six personnages). The book closes with a stimulating afterword, focused on the term proto-feminist, that reflects on the critical biases that too often limit our understanding, and stunt our analyses, of historical texts.

Some readers, of course, will take issue with one or more of Guynn's myriad, and oftentimes provocative, hypotheses, such as his suggestion that female submission, which alternates with “women on top” in farce, can itself be a mode of resistance. But there is no denying the merits of his project: it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, well grounded in relevant intertexts and critical theory, and groundbreaking in its success at reimagining the “ludic, interactive, and unpredictable liveness of the festive stage” (26).