Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.

This chapter examines the imaginative choices, and the implications of these choices, that John Manningham made as he created a record of his daily life, what we now call his Diary, relating these choices to the urban metaphysical style that I have traced in the previous chapters. Manninghams collection of notes as a whole does imply that he rejected a more pragmatic or moralistic approach to his recordkeeping, a rejection in line with Nashes turn away from humanist utility and towards contention and wit. In addition, once we view Manningham’s diary as a reordering of experience, we can identify within the selection and sequence of entries a particular orientation to the world, a processing of urban reality that aligns with the recreation of reality in the writings of his Inns peers. Not only might we see a rejection of humanist models of reading and writing in the diary, we can also clearly see Manningham embracing a skeptical, witty, and contentious style of being in the world. It is a style that is highly performative, just as Nashe’s prose and the Inns satires are; it is also a style that signals an awareness of the heterogeneity and fragmentary nature of urban experience.