Laurent Joubert’s Erreurs populaire au fait de la médecine et régime de santé, whose
1576 edition included catalogues of sundry medical beliefs entitled Propos vulgaires, or
sayings from the untutored, gleaned at his behest by friends and colleagues. Satirical
depictions of Catholic folk practices by Protestant writers and polemicists, such as the
erudite Henri Estienne (Apologie pour Hérodote), also provided useful insights into the
folk religion of the time.
Medieval French folklore became a more densely charted sea with the 19th-century
development of folklore studies throughout Europe, in the intellectual context of
Romanticism. The upsurge of Germanic nationalism profoundly affected French folklore
studies, since German scholars happily annexed France to Germanic culture. An
important example of this approach is found in Liebrecht’s notes to a partial edition of
Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, entitled Ein Beitrag zu deutsches Mythologie
(1856), a comparative study of medieval traditions with a medley of modern west
European folk traditions, many of them French.
Throughout the 19th century, scholarly journals, national, regional, and local,
published a plethora of articles on aspects of medieval French folklore, in which
philology was dominant. Such medievalists as Joseph Bédier, Gaston Raynaud, and Paul
Meyer focused on the role of medieval French fabliaux and other tales in the formation
and transmission of the corpus of folktales and legends. Much attention was directed to
the question of attributing Indian origins to European tales, and medieval tales generally;
such was the argument in Bédier’s Fabliaux and in Cosquin’s 1911 study of the tale of
“The Cat and the Candle” (Romania 40). Studies on Old French explained façons de
dire—sayings, idiomatic expressions—and helped explicate the extended meaning of
words and the beliefs underpinning them. Meyer and others also devoted attention to
medieval medicine and its relationship to folk practices. In the early 19th century,
extensive collections of miscellaneous texts were published: comic plays, debates,
pamphlets, and broadsides, many of them connected to carnival and other popular feasts.
The Romanian folklorist Sainéan studied the history of French slang; the polymath
Francisque Michel’s commentaries on the races maudites—pariah communities, such as
the cagots, the presumed descendants of lepers—albeit now obsolete in scope and
method, raised a question of folk culture and French history that is still discussed by
medieval historians.
The early 20th century saw giant leaps in French folkloristics. Van Gennep’s Manuel
de folklore français contemporain (1937–58), still the standard work, provided the
calendar and festive structure for the study of isolated folklore manifestations; his
discussion included medieval examples. Saintyves, concerned with the survival of pagan
practices, treated many themes of medieval hagiography in connection with folklore,
such as the cult of St. Christopher, the symbolism of leprosy, virgin births, and protective
processions around cities. Another landmark was Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch (1924;
trans. 1973). A historian of the of the economic and social relations of feudalism, Bloch
studied the healing powers of kings, exploring the connection among the political rituals
of the monarchy, its religious content, and the practices of the folk.
Bloch’s advances in bringing the discipline of history into the study of medieval
folklore and Vaultier’s reliance on letters of pardon did not have their full impact until
much later, with the “New History.” The historian Jacques Le Goff favored a
multidisciplinary approach to history that included folklore and its methodologies as
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