Aymon, but also with the symbols of folly and with obscene gestures to ward off evil,
along with references to social customs, like the ius primae noctis.
Folk practices and customs are known through ample documentation. Letters of
pardon refer to the organization of the calendar, feasts, and other aspects of religion.
They bring us right into the worldview of the protagonists. A landmark in the study of
medieval French folklore was Vaultier’s work on letters of pardon during the Hundred
Years’ War (1965), which incorporated fragmentary information into the standard
classification system of folklorists.
Another document of inestimable impact is the 15th-century Évangiles des quenoilles,
a collection of aphorisms, medical recipes, charms, and beliefs attributed to a group of
rural women who are presented as transmitting their knowledge through the sometimes
bored or ironic cooperation of a scribe. Jeay’s 1982 study raised crucial issues of how to
read “folk” against “clerical,” direct information against mediated, and how to exercise
suspension of disbelief in handling such a source.
Literature provides a wealth of references to songs, legends, and proverbs. Though
folk music, like all medieval music, is one of the hardest domains to document, song texts
were embedded in medieval narratives and in separate collections, such as the chansons
de toile. The function of orality in the formation, composition, and transmission of many
medieval fictional narratives has been the subject of long debate. This is particularly true
of the chanson de geste; the study of its formulaic composition, facilitated by Duggan’s
use of computers, has prompted serious rethinking of the relationship between oral and
written composition and of blithe characterizations of a genre as uniquely “aristocratic”
or “popular.”
The extensive corpus of exempla, catalogued by Tubach (1969), is replete with
material from oral tradition and has generated a renewed interest in the sources and
variations of complex folktale cycles and of the relationships and tensions between folk
culture and its clerical voicing. The study of hagiography allows us to differentiate saints’
cults that can be deemed truly popular from those cults generated from above; an
example is historical anthropologist Jean-Claude Schmitt’s 1983 study of the local cult of
a deceased dog “canonized” by the folk. Feminist studies, often coming from a social-
science or art-history perspective, have played a major role in the development of this
aspect of medieval folklore, broadening its definition beyond traditional distinctions of
rural-urban or elite-folk to include the communities of women. Ashley and Sheingorn, for
instance, begin their volume of essays on the place of St. Anne in late-medieval society
by stating that their perspective is at the intersection of popular culture, popular piety, and
women’s studies, informed by cultural and gender studies, and attempts to bridge the gap
between popular and elite cultures, between folklore and theology.
The foregoing represents just a sampling of French medieval-folklore scholarship,
making reference to trends and issues that reflect to the greatest possible extent on the
whole. Other areas that have been studied include public performance, carnival plays and
other rituals, fraternities, the folklore of trades, folk medicine, fools and folly, witchcraft
and the Devil, demons and ghosts, the legends of Melusine the serpent and Hellekin,
leader of the unquiet dead, and tales of Roland leaving his mark on the landscape.
Though fully recognized as a discipline only in the past few decades, the study of
medieval French folklore has a venerable history. One of the earliest explicit attempts at
gathering folklore from primary sources in an organized way was the 16th-century doctor
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