"Deeply learned without making a parade of its learning, The Humanist Comedy is urbane and graceful in exposition; and like everything by Welsh, it is lucid and often eloquent, with a wry wit throughout."--Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University " The Humanist Comedy is an imaginative and erudite history of laughter as a means of planting truths in resistant minds. Alexander Welsh shows how Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Molière, and others have vindicated comedy as a genre of wisdom literature."--David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English, Yale University "Both intelligent and engaging throughout, The Humanist Comedy traces a steady tradition from classical antiquity to modern secularized Europe of serious comic skepticism about divinity and its prerogatives."--Gordon Braden, Linden Kent Memorial Professor, University of Virginia.