ABSTRACT
Laughter at religious error became widely acceptable. The northern Renaissance was racked by religious wars and oppression; the wonder is that, in the earlier days of the sixteenth century, so many could have made religious error not shocking, but amusing. Laughter echoed far and wide. It changed the religious beliefs of men and women. The laugh-raisers and their supporters justified their laughter with the help of their Bibles, and with the help of some of the greatest writers and thinkers known to Renaissance scholars. A Humanist is devoted to 'politer literature' - to all those many kinds of writing which were known in Renaissance Latin as litterce humaniores. That literature was mainly in Greek and in good, not barbarous, Latin. The Greek and Latin antiquity in which Renaissance scholars sought artistic guidance and truth in almost all fields of human inquiry was not coterminous with pagan antiquity.
