FABLIAUX: Ribald Tales from the Old French

Some 22 of these short morality (?) fables, a favorite genre of the middle ages, have been selected and translated here and the bawdy, wise, sly to slapstick humor of the originals have been preserved. There are interpretative notes not only on their venue (sometimes in even earlier literatures) but also their reincarnations through the ages, say in Baccaccio, La Fontaine, Chaucer, Moliere and other less known works, along with short biographical comments on some of the better known contributors, Jean Bodel, Jean de Conde, etc. One is included in the original old French, as a challenge perhaps. The fact that almost all of these stories have been retold and reworked through the ages attests to their universality and they range in humor from the simplistic to the sophisticated as knights and ladies, oafs, scholars and scalawags all practice to deceive and divert.