The Old French Fabliaux

Offers a close analysis of the Old French fabliaux, short medieval comic tales in narrative verse noted for their irreverence and sexual content. Examines key images, such as gambling, illness, and damnation, which develop into themes and motifs running through all the texts, and which add layers of ironic patterning to the subject matter and narrative of each tale. Of interest to those studying medieval culture, Old French literature, and the development of the short or comic narrative. Lacks a subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

This collection of 14 critical essays examines short comedic tales from the 13th and 14th centuries, commonly known as the medieval French fabliaux. Each essay focuses on a different aspect of common fabliaux humor, as illustrated by a scholarly analysis of one or several original texts. Topics covered include the frequent use of bacon as humorous symbolism (in Barat et Haimet, Aloul, and Le Sacristain II), the use of comedic rhyme (in Le Prestre comporte and Le Prestre et le chevalier), and the common "virgin miracle" tale (in La Nonete). Throughout the work, contributors attempt to provide a serious analysis of the fabliaux without losing sight of the tales' original comedic content and appeal.

"A remarkably well-informed and truly innovative study of the way Boccaccio reimagined and rewrote Old French fabliaux in his Decameron."—François Rigolot, Princeton University "Theoretically savvy, and yet jargon-free, philologically impeccable and critically acute, this is a book that shows the author’s unflinching dedication to the highest standards of scholarship."—Simone Marchesi, author of Dante and Augustine "Brown’s attention to codicological contexts coupled with persuasive new interpretations of some of the fabliaux and Decameron stories make this book a pleasure to read for medievalist veterans and novices alike."—Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, author of Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378-1417 Short works known for their humor and ribaldry, the fabliaux were comic or satirical tales told by wandering minstrels in medieval France. Although the fabliaux are widely acknowledged as inspiring Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, the Decameron, this theory has never been substantiated beyond perceived commonalities in length and theme. This new and provocative interpretation examines the formal similarities between the Decameron’s tales of wit, wisdom, and practical jokes and the popular thirteenth-century fabliaux. Katherine Brown examines these works through a prism of reversal and chiasmus to show that Boccaccio was not only inspired by the content of the fabliaux but also by their fundamental design--where a passage of truth could be read as a lie or a tale of life as a tale of death. Brown reveals close resemblances in rhetoric, literary models, and narrative structure to demonstrate how the Old French manuscripts of the fabliaux were adapted in the organization of the Decameron. Identifying specific examples of fabliaux transformed by Boccaccio for his classic Decameron, Brown shows how Boccaccio refashioned borrowed literary themes and devices, playing with endless possibilities of literary creation through manipulations of his model texts. Katherine A. Brown is a specialist of medieval French and Italian literature.

Winner • Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Translation Bawdier than The Canterbury Tales, The Fabliaux is the first major English translation of the most scandalous and irreverent poetry in Western literature. Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these virtually unknown erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depicts priapic priests, randy wives, and their cuckolded husbands in tales that are shocking even by today’s standards. Chaucer and Boccaccio borrowed heavily from these riotous tales, which were the wit of the common man rebelling against the aristocracy and Church in matters of food, money, and sex. Containing 69 poems with a parallel Old French text, The Fabliaux comes to life in a way that has never been done in nearly eight hundred years.

This study is about the comic structure of the fabliaux. The survival of approximately 160 Old French fabliaux, some in several versions and in different manuscripts, attests to their widespread popularity in the Middle Ages. Chaucer's fabliaux are essentially the same genre as the Old French fabliaux, and hence their humor is essentially the same. Our own enjoyment of them is in its own way quite refined and even analogous to certain spiritual experiences. In focusing on the comic climax of the fabliaux, I necessarily talk about their structure, which has its own function within the story regardless of what influenced it or caused it to be there and regardless of what it reflects.

The Old French fabliaux may be notorious for their bawdy content, but few aspects of these medieval comic narratives are as astonishing as their depiction of the parish priest, whose fiscal and sexual transgressions are on occasion so enormous that lay protagonists are driven to inflict graphic punishments ranging from public exposure and communal beating to castration and murder. In this study, Burrows draws on social psychological research into the cognitive and socio-motivational components of stereotyping to explore the forces underlying the creation and development of the fabliau priest. Through an assessment of the constituent elements of the figure against a background of a range of literary and historical sources, Burrows demonstrates that the literary figure is the product of the specific socio-historical context of contemporaneous changes in relationships between Church and laity in which anticlerical stereotyping, in a manner comparable to other instances of outgroup derogation, can be attributed to a quest for positive social identity and ingroup solidarity on the part of an inscribed lay audience.