A comic tale in verse which flourished in the 12th and 13th cs., principally in the north of France. Although the name, which means “little fable” in the Picard dialect, suggests a short story, a few fabliaux run over a thousand lines. Most, however, are short and share a common thread of unabashedly bawdy humor, the subjects being mainly sexual or excretory. A few names, such as Rutebeuf, Philippe de Beaumanoir, Jean Bodel, and Gautier Le Leu, have been associated with the f., but most examples remain anonymous. Critical opinion in the past has been divided as to whether the fabliaux were bourgeois or courtly in origin. Modern scholars favor the view that their authors as well as their audiences were not limited to any one social class. On the other hand, the predominance of courtly and lyrical sentiments make it all but anachronistic to speak of the f. as a bourgeois genre, as Bédier did in his classic study (1st ed. 1893).
The characteristic f. style is simple, unsophisticated, and practical—the materialistic view of everyday life. Though the fabliaux have been accused of antifeminist sentiment, it is interesting to note that, in most instances where such a sentiment is expressed, it is appended to a tale which illustrates female ingenuity and superiority, often over a foolish husband. If there is a prevailing theme in the plots of the fabliaux, it is that of “the trickster tricked.” The verseform is commonly octosyllabic couplets.
When critics complain of the obscenity of the f.—and historically many have done so—they usually seem to be offended more by the vulgarity of the lang. than by the prurience of the stories. True, in sexual matters the lang. is routinely explicit, yet the social attitudes underlying it are conventional, even conservative, and may indicate a medieval sensibility toward such matters that underlies and antedates both courtly purity and Christian puritanism.
In the 14th c. the vogue of the f. spread to Italy and England, where Chaucer borrowed freely from the genre for eight or nine of his Canterbury Tales , esp. the Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale . The f. may fairly be said to be the genre of greatest interest to Chaucer in his mature work. Fr. trad. continued in the prose nouvelle , but the influence of the older form may be seen centuries later in the poetry of La Fontaine in France, C. F. Gellert in Germany, and I. A. Krylov in Russia.
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