To sum up, then, it would appear that the humorous muse in the Middle Ages concerned herself chiefly with scattering and disseminating moral lessons, which, because of the superiority of the teachers to the taught, showed up an ignorance that was laughable.
The fables and maxims that had been passed from mouth to mouth were put into writing and translated into various tongues.
The Sanscrit or Hindoo stories were undoubtedly the oldest and from them were taken the Arabic and Persian tales. These drifted into Europe and took a proper place among the literatures of the world.
Coleridge says that humor took its rise in the Middle Ages, while a present day writer contradictingly asserts that nobody smiled from the second century until the fifteenth.
It is true, that as the advent of Christianity put a full stop to all progress in the arts and sciences so it impeded the advance of learning and delayed the development of humor.
And yet, though men may not have smiled during the dark ages, they now and then laughed, at a humor that was far from subtle, but which was the foundation of the world’s merriment.
The monks and ecclesiastics who formulated the moral precepts for the people found that the lessons were better conveyed by funny stories than by serious ones, and the preachers came to use the hammer of amusement to drive home their good advices.
MODERN HUMOR
With the readiness of the essayists to ascribe literary paternity, Chaucer is called the Father of English Poetry.
Coleridge observes that he is the best representative in English of the Norman-French Trouvères, but even more than by the French, Chaucer was influenced by the great Italians, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, as well as by Ovid and Virgil.