game in the Sots ecclésiastiques to show the insatiable avarice and duplicity of certain
prelates. In some plays, such as the Gens nouveaux, only wicked fools appear; the voice
of morality is either expressed by their victim (Le Monde) or is silent. (Alan Knight
[1983] has suggested grouping this kind of play in a separate category, the farce
moralisée, to distinguish it from the sottie, in which the fools speak for a moral point of
view.)
Through this variety of dramatic structures and characters, the sotties express
humorous dismay at society’s increasing immorality. This satiric view, which is often
conservative, makes of the sotties a powerful and intriguing expression of late-medieval
popular thought.
Heather M.Arden
[See also: FARCE; GRINGORE, PIERRE; MORALITY PLAYS; THEATER]
Droz, Eugénie, ed. Le recueil Trepperel. 2 vols. Paris: Droz, 1935, Vol. 1: Les sotties.
Picot, Emile, ed. Recueil général des sotties. 3 vols. Paris: Didot, 1902–12.
Arden, Heather M. Fools’ Plays: A Study of Satire in the “Sottie.” Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980.
Aubailly, Jean-Claude. Le monologue, le dialogue et la sottie. Paris: Champion, 1976.
Garapon, Robert. La fantaisie verbale et le comique dans le théâtre français du moyen âge a la fin
du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Colin, 1957.
Knight, Alan E. “The Medieval Theater of the Absurd.” PMLA 86 (1971):183–89.
——. Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1983.
SOUILLAC
. Reclaimed from marshland in what is now the department of the Lot by Benedictine
monks, Souillac (from souille, a wallowing place of wild boars) boasts one of the purest
examples of the domed churches of southwest France and important fragments of
Romanesque portal sculpture. Only the 12th-century abbey church of Sainte-Marie,
remarkable for its harmonious proportions and unity of style, escaped the destruction of
the wars of religion. The plan—single nave with domes on pendentives over two bays
and a third over the crossing, projecting transepts with a polygonal chapel off each arm,
and an ambu-
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