manuscript (B.N. fr. 1553) in 142 monorhymed decasyllabic quatrains. The narrative
includes a bird debate and an encounter with the God of Love.
Ardis T.B.Butterfield
Lecompte, I.C., ed. “Le fablel dou Dieu d’Amors.” Modern Philology 8(1910–11):63–86.
Oulmont, Charles, ed. Les débats du clerc et du chevalier. Paris: Champion, 1911, pp. 197–216.
Windeatt, Barry A., trans. Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues. Woodbridge: Boydell
and Brewer, 1982, pp. 85–91.
FABLIAU
. Concentrated in the north of France and dating from the 13th and first half of the 14th
centuries, the fabliaux are relatively brief and generally comic tales, composed in the
octosyllabic rhymed couplets that are the standard narrative form of the period. Although
many Chaucerians designate certain of the stories in The Canterbury Tales as fabliaux,
the term is more properly, if not exclusively, applicable to a large group of French texts.
Over forty surviving manuscripts preserve fabliaux. Some include only a single one
alongside texts from other genres; others are veritable compendia of fabliaux, with one
(B.N. fr. 837) containing around sixty of the works. A traditional controversy about the
fabliaux concerns their public and their fundamental character. Conceptions of the
fabliaux were shaped largely by Joseph Bédier’s 1893 study. Bédier, who had
comparatively little regard for the purely literary merits of the fabliaux but a keen
appreciation of their value for social historians, found a correlation between the rise of
the genre and the growth of cities and of a thriving bourgeoisie. His conclusion was that,
just as the courtly circles had their literature (e.g., courtly romances, cultivated lyric
poetry, lais), now the bourgeois public had its own. This conception of origins and
audiences offered a convenient explanation for the fabliaux’ apparent lack of literary
pretentions, their frequent choice of middle-class or peasant settings, their frankness in
sexual and linguistic matters, and their irreverent and often unsubtle humor. The fabliaux,
in other words, were everything the courtly romance was not, and they must therefore
belong to a different social class.
In fact, Bédier’s views were considerably less categorical than this summary suggests;
he acknowledged, for example, that the fabliaux were heard and enjoyed in courtly
circles. Nonetheless, what most scholars retained from Bédier’s book was a sharp
division of literature into courtly and bourgeois genres; and, while a few studies
questioned or qualified his theories, they continued to be widely accepted until
challenged by Per Nykrog in 1957. Acknowledging most of the characteristics Bédier
identified in the fabliaux, Nykrog disagreed that the genre was the product of a bourgeois
mentality. Identifying in a number of fabliaux certain situations and formulae that would
likely be appreciated only by a courtly audience, he concluded that the fabliaux often
exploit or parody courtly texts and situations. They are thus as courtly, in their way, as
are romances and lais.
Although a necessary corrective to Bédier’s theory, Nykrog’s study is at times too
uncompromising. Numerous fabliaux clearly do not reflect courtly ideals or language,
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