Ioca Monachorum

The ioca (or joca) monachorum, meaning monks' pastimes or monks' jokes, is a genre of short question-and-answer texts written for the use of Christian monks. The questions often concern biblical subjects but can also touch on literary, philosophical, or historical matters, and many take the form of riddles or jokes meant to stimulate thought and aid memory. Originating in the Greek East, the genre spread through Christendom and had reached Gaul and the British Isles by the sixth century, surviving in Latin, German, Swedish, Occitan, Catalan, and Castilian examples down to the end of the Middle Ages. A single ioca could be copied into several manuscript collections, and the Old Testament was a particularly favored source of questions, often asking who in the Bible was first to do something.