ABSTRACT
The term denotes a medieval literary genre: a short, ribald tale in verse with stock characters, realistic details, sexual transgressions, obscenity, scatology, and a clever plot mocking human weaknesses and making cynical fun of conventional notions of morality, authority, and poetic justice. Deriving from the medieval French dialect word flabel or fablel, the fabliau forms an original generic combination of the farce and the dirty story. In the fabliau the “givens” are infidelity, opportunism, trickery, and gullibility. Considering their shocking and subversive content, fabliaux were surprisingly popular in medieval France, especially between the mid-twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries. Most were anonymous, probably composed by wandering minstrels, usually termed jongleurs. Of the great number originally current, only about 150 survive. Although the content is obviously low, there is still academic dispute about whether the intended audience was bourgeois (according to Joseph Bedier 1895) or aristocratic (according to Per Nykrog 1957) or popular.
