The Fabliaux
A fabliau is an “Old French comic tale in verse,” explains R. Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French at Yale University, in his informative, tantalizing introduction to the first modern anthology of these little-known, devilishly bawdy and irreverent works. The 69 fabliaux presented here in their original French and translated into rascally, buoyant English by Nathaniel E. Dubin, are relentlessly scabrous, egregiously misogynistic, and exuberantly oppositional to “bourgeois respectability” and the church. With such mischievous titles as “The Cleric behind the Chest,” “Black Balls,” and “The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk,” the rollicking fabliaux were composed during the Middle Ages to be performed aloud, forgotten for more than two centuries, then gingerly resurrected by scholars. Vivid, funny, robustly grotesque, and drolly outrageous, these satirical tales of lust, revenge, and folly feature lecherous peasants, fornicating priests, scoundrels, fools, and women wily and tough, castigated and abused. Though their leering focus is on the body and its appetites, the fabliaux do reflect their world, one both alien to us and undeniably familiar. An historic literary achievement bound to arouse vociferous discussion. --Donna Seaman