medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The much better version of this joke names the well-known bellringer and
his church, so I think it must be both medieval and religion-oriented...
Quasimodo, the bellringer of Notre Dame, put an ad in the papers for an
assistant. One man applied for the job but he had no arms.
"How are you going to assist me?" asked Quasimodo.
"That's easy!" replied the man and he ran at the bell and banged it with
his head.
BONG!!!
"That's amazing!" said Quasimodo. "Could you show me that again?"
"Sure!" said the man and he ran at the bell again but he missed the
swinging bell and fell out of the bell tower. A crowd huddled around the
hapless man lying in the street and someone asked, "Does anyone know who
he is?"
Quasimodo came out and said, "I don't know his name, but his face sure
rings a bell!"
--
I googled for medieval jokes and actually found some serious stuff on
the topic. In keeping with this thread, however,
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/medpranks.html offered some anecdotes on
medieval religious chicanery and hoaxing:
"The notebook of Thomas Betson, a fifteenth-century monk at Syon Abbey
in Middlesex, records his joke of hiding a beetle inside a hollowed-out
apple. When the apple began to mysteriously rock back and forth people
believed it to be possessed...
"The Secretum Philosophorum, which was a kind of fourteenth-century
guide to trickery, offered a recipe for magically transforming water
into wine. The trick was to secretly drop pieces of bread into the
water, after first soaking the bread pieces in dark wine and then drying
them in the sun..."
The site cites Johan Burkhard Mencken, _The Charlatanry of the Learned
(De charlataneria eruditorum, 1715)_. Translated from the German by
Francis E. Litz, with notes and an introduction by H. L. Mencken. NY:
Knopf, 1937.
Cheers,
Al Magary
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