This joke, possibly the best in this collection of essays (certainly that which got the biggest laugh at the conference where these papers were originally presented), is to be found in John Haldon's treatment of ‘Humour and the everyday in Byzantium’, and makes a useful focus for this introduction. Identifying the humorous in late antique and early medieval writing is very often a question of locating the key.

That, however, presupposes the willingness to look for the key in the first place, and this seems to have been conspicuously absent in previous generations of scholarship. At several points in the following chapters, we shall encounter footnotes pointing out how previous researchers have either not noticed that a work was intended to be funny, or have rejected interpretations of late antique or early medieval works which see them as anything other than entirely earnest. Even a genre as overtly intended to amuse as riddle collections has, in its continental manifestations, been neglected. Recently, historians have looked increasingly at humour and its uses; the ancient world and Anglo-Saxon England, with its distinctive corpus of literature, have been well served. The late antique and early medieval periods in Europe, however, have not yet received their share of this attention.

There are a number of possible reasons for this neglect.