even as parody. The range of fabliau subjects and methods is extraordinarily wide,
varying from linguistic playfulness and complex comic developments to unsubtle
anecdotes and simple dirty jokes. Some are “courtly” in some sense; others are not,
although we have no convincing evidence that even the crude sexual jokes might not
appeal to inhabitants of courts. Moreover, as Jean Rychner demonstrated in 1960, we
often have two or more variants of the same fabliau, with the situation or the language
apparently adapted to different publics.
A second and more persistent controversy concerns the definition of the genre and the
precise constitution of the fabliau canon, questions that have never been satisfactorily
resolved. Bédier formulated the most frequently quoted definition: Les fabliaux sont des
contes a rire en vers (“Fabliaux are comic tales in verse”). The generality of this
convenient definition holds a certain appeal but also limits its usefulness considerably.
Furthermore, the emphasis on humor may raise a question instead of resolving it. The
inspiration or purpose of a fabliau is not always easy to define, and it is in any case of
questionable value as a generic determinant. If we assume with Bédier that all fabliaux
are humorous, we should then routinely exclude from the genre all compositions that we
judge to be (for example) primarily moralizing, including a number of texts once
published with fabliaux. An example is the well-known La housse partie, a work
sometimes excluded, despite its cleverness and its general resemblance to fabliaux,
simply because it is considered more serious than humorous.
On the other hand, this criterion is not applied uniformly, and scholars often include
among the fabliaux a few works that make a serious moral point in a clever fashion. In
Du vilain qui conquis paradis par plait, the protagonist argues his way into heaven by
pointing out that the sins of those already there (e.g., Peter, who denied his Lord) are
considerably more serious than his own.
One frequent approach to the problem of definition is to study self-nominated
fabliaux, that is, those that describe themselves as being fabliaux. Critics may thus limit
themselves to those works, which number about seventy, or they may begin with those in
an attempt to define the properties of the genre and then include in the canon other poems
that exhibit those same properties. Even this approach is problematical, however, because
it assumes that medieval authors possessed both a specific consciousness of literary
categories and a precise terminology for them, and the evidence does not convincingly
support such an assumption. For example, many of the compositions commonly taken as
fabliaux describe themselves in a variety of ways, as fabliaux, fables, contes (“stories” or
“tales”), dits (short narratives), and a number of other terms.
The formulation of a satisfactory definition is by no means a simple matter. In
practice, each critic is left to construct a canon. Bédier listed 147 works he considered to
be fabliaux; Nykrog expanded that number to 160. Noomen’s critical edition of the
fabliaux, begun in 1983, will include 127 texts. Most likely, the specific confines of the
genre can never be established; at the edges of the genre, at least, works that are
presumably fabliaux tend to merge with other forms and types of texts. The solution to
the problem of taxonomy is necessarily more pragmatic than technical or scientific: there
is a solid core of texts accepted as fabliaux by virtually all critics, and from a study of
those compositions we can derive reliable notions of the themes, styles, and techniques
characteristic of the genre.
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