Fabliau

French Language and Literature
Authors • Lit categories

French literary history Medieval 16th century • 17th century 18th century • 19th century 20th century • Contemporary

Literature by country France • Quebec Postcolonial • Haiti Franco-American

Portals France • Literature French literature Wikisource

A fabliau (French pronunciation: [fabljo]; plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs and clerics in France between c. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes generally critical or mocking of the church and nobility. While most fabliaux were anonymous, we do know some authors like Jean Bodel or Guèrin, who wrote during the peak of the genre's popularity. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decameron and by Geoffrey Chaucer for The Canterbury Tales. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined. According to R. Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism in Europe.

Some nineteenth-century scholars, most notably Gaston Paris, argue that fabliaux originally came from the Orient and were brought to the West by returning crusaders.