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Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg, which is white and hair-less as an egge. (Robert Herrick, 1648, ‘Her legs’) Flying to Chicago a few years ago, I realised, from the sound of predominantly female laughter, that the in-flight movie What Women Want 2 was being particularly well received by the women passengers
, loathing, and learning Along with the more horrifying deceits encouraged in the widow’s speech there is also a pervasive sense of humour. Perfetti considers the subversive nature of the widow’s speech in the wider context of female laughter. 27 In the Tretis she suggests that the women’s laughter is contrived as a counter-narrative to popular good-wife treatises. Where Perfetti emphasises the comic effect achieved by a playing-off of ‘medieval husbands’ fears of their sexual inadequacy, and the damage it could
jesting the narrator effectively creates a scene anathema to the image of the courtly or upper-class lady. Lisa Perfetti describes medieval perceptions of female laughter: medieval physicians believed that women were more prone to laughter as a result of their ‘excessive, shifting fluids and wandering uterus [which made them] less able to control any inappropriate impulse to laugh’. 27 Based on this perception, medieval decorum manuals for women discouraged unrestrained laughter, arguing that it lessened beauty by creating