"Medieval Joke Poetry" examines the intersection of jokes, laughter, insults, and poetry in a collection of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century medieval Iberian songs known as the "Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer." Written in Galician-Portuguese, these 'songs of mockery and insult' make up a heterogeneous corpus whose witticisms are by turns funny and vicious, crudely obscene and exquisitely sophisticated, playful and deadly serious. Liu's readings disentangle the complex verbal strategies of these joke-poems in order to reveal the latent cultural tensions that underlie their humor....