ABSTRACT
No information has come down to us concerning the author or the date of Aucassin et Nicolette. The sole surviving manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 2168) appears to have been copied in the later part of the thirteenth century. Suggested dates for the composition of the text itself vary considerably. Gaston Paris (1879, p.289) * it as early as the reign of Louis VII (d. 1180), but the text is now regularly assigned to the first half of the thirteenth century (Roques, p. xv, Dufournet, p. 5). However, a date around 1270, for which there is possible justification on paleographical grounds (see note to XXIV, 3), would correspond well to the spirit of the text (Hunt, 1979, p. 352). If the mention of a twenty-year war (X, 31) is an allusion to the Albigensian Crusade (Griffin, p. 250), the text must have been composed after 1229. The Picard dialectal features discernible in the extant manuscript (Suchier, pp. 67–84, Roques, pp. xvii–xx, Dufournet, pp. 38–40) can be accepted as a reflection of the language and area of composition of the original text. The form and the spirit of Aucassin et Nicolette could well have links with two important aspects of the literary life of northeastern France in the early thirteenth century: the rise of the fabliaux and developments in drama.
