The Fabliaux

"Like Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, Nathaniel Dubin's The Fabliaux reproduces the world and the feeling of the medieval tale . . . that travels joyfully from the Middle Ages to the present," writes R. Howard Bloch. Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these virtually unknown yet deeply influential erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depict priapic priests, randy wives, and their cuckolded husbands in tales that are shocking and hilarious even by today's standards. Chaucer and Boccacio borrowed heavily from these riotous tales, which were the wit of the common man rebelling against the aristocracy and Church in matters of food, money, and sex. Containing 69 poems with a parallel Old French text, all deftly translated by Nathaniel E. Dubin, this handsomely designed volume brings to life The Fabliaux in a way that has never been done in nearly eight hundred years.