Introduction

At the beginning of the nineteenth century – as part of a broader systematisation of knowledge which included the rediscovery and cataloguing of ancient manuscripts–philologists defined a number of Medieval literary and theatrical ‘genres’. This was also the very moment when the concept of ‘elegiac comedy’, synonymous with ‘Latin “comedy”’, was born. A modern concept – or even concepts, if we take into account the discrepancies in opinion on the specificity of texts in question – the term of ‘elegiac comedy’ singles out some part of twelfth- and thirteenth-century literary production, with or without respect to the attested use of the notion of comedia in the Middle Ages, and to the medieval theories of writing. As such, this modern construct requires revision.

Consequently, in the present paper, the term ‘elegiac comedy’ will be used to designate only a particular class of texts, which remain the invention of modern philologists; it should not, however, be understood to denote any kind of medieval genre, although it does not negate the possibility that these texts could be perceived in the Middle Ages, and still in the Early Modernity, as representing one category of literary composition. The purpose of this article is to reconsider the specificity of texts called ‘elegiac comedies’ with special reference to the question of their theatricality.