Jest books (or jestbooks) are collections of jokes and humorous anecdotes in book form – a literary genre which reached its greatest importance in the early modern period.^[1]

The oldest surviving collection of jokes is the Byzantine Philogelos from the first millennium.^[2] In Western Europe, the medieval fabliau^[3] and the Arab/Italian novella^[4] built up a large body of humorous tales; but it was only with the Facetiae of Poggio (1451) that the anecdote first appears rendered down into joke form (with prominent punchline) in an early modern collection.^[5]

Like his immediate successors Heinrich Bebel and Girolamo Morlini, Poggio translated his folk material from their original language into Latin, the universal European language of the time.^[6] From such universal collections, developed the particular vernacular jestbooks of the various European countries in the sixteenth century.^[7]

Tudor and Stuart jest books were typically anonymous collections of individual jests in English,^[8] a mix of verse and prose perhaps more comparable to the latter-day magazine than to a normal book.^[9] Some, however (following a German model), did attempt to link their jokes into a picaresque sort of narrative around one, often roguish hero, as with Richard Tarlton.^[10] Jest books took a generally mocking tone,^[11] with civility, and social superiors like the 'stupid scholar' as favourite targets.^[12]

The low-life, realistic tone of the jest book, akin to coney-catching pamphlets, fed into the early English novels (or at least prose fiction) of writers like Thomas Nashe and Thomas Deloney.^[13] Jestbooks also contributed to popular stage entertainment, through such dramatists as Marlowe and Shakespeare.^[14] Playbooks and jestbooks were treated as forms of light entertainment, with jokes from the one being recycled in the other, and vice versa.^[15]

Advances in printing meant that quantitatively jestbooks reached their greatest circulation in the 17th and 18th centuries; but qualitatively their contents was increasingly either a repetition of earlier publications or an artificial imitation of what had in the Elizabethan jest book been a genuine folk content.^[16] Bowdlerisation in the 19th century completed the fall of the English-language jest book from Elizabethan vitality to subsequent triviality.^[17]

• French jestbooks were widely drawn on in the work of Rabelais.^[18] Arguably at least, the French jestbook tradition survived unbowdlerised into the twentieth century.^[19]
• Germany had a rich tradition of jestbooks, with Till Eulenspiegel as a prominent character.^[20]
• The first American jest book was published in 1787, and thereafter the genre flourished for some half a century, before giving way to the twin influence of censorship and the rise of the comic almanac.^[21]

• Robert Armin
• Salcia Landmann
• Shakespeare's Jest Book

• Joseph Fliesler, Anecdota Americana (1927)
• W. C. Hazlitt ed., Shakespeare Jestbooks 3vol (1864)

• Jestbooks (London)