This volume of eighteen collected essays was produced following a colloquium on fabliaux held in November of 2021 in Orléans, France. Its publication in 2024 coincides grosso modo with the Agrégation de Lettres modernes (a French national exam for recruiting secondary and university professors), which focused on fabliaux in 2024. As the editors note in their fourteen-page introduction, interest in fabliaux in Francophone areas has been sporadic in the past twenty-five years (9), especially in comparison with the proliferation of books and articles written by Anglophones, and to a lesser extent in Germanophone and Italophone contexts; as such, this volume promises to fill a gap in the Francophone sphere on fabliaux. In addition to the eighteen essays, the volume also contains an analytic bibliography of all studies on the fabliaux since 2008. This exceptional addition by Anne Cobby continues her previous bibliography on the fabliaux published in 2009, and offers readers another 322 entries on fabliaux studies.
The volume does not have one overarching critical or methodological approach, but rather divides the various studies into five categories, which, nevertheless, overlap at times. The first category, containing three essays, focuses on the fabliaux as parts of collections, with an emphasis on manuscript studies. The second section is devoted to stylistic analyses and versification of fabliaux, or rather of specific writers in two of the three essays. This section also contains numerous charts documenting types of rhymes in the contribution of Danièle James-Raoul, and the length of répliques, understood as the direct speech of characters, in the contribution of Corinne Denoyelle. The third category, on realism and materialism, also contains three essays which discuss food, sexuality, and violence, respectively. The fourth section is interdisciplinary and presents four contributions on topics which range from sacrilege to justice, the medical humanities, to the question of mentalities as defined by Alain Corbellari. The final section, which is also the longest, explores the reception of fabliaux in various collections and time periods in five different essays. After the essay of Corinne Pierreville comes an Annex of seven versions of fabliaux from Renart le Contrefait (316-326). Similarly, the essay by Jean-Marie Fritz is followed by two appendices, one tracking the different stories in the collections of Barbazan, Legrand d’Aussy, Imbert (which is the primary focus of the essay), and their corresponding titles in the Nouveau Recueil Complet des Fabliaux (NRCF), where those exist; the second appendix gives all of the stories in Imbert’s collection, with their equivalent titles in the Barbazan and Legrand d’Aussy editions. The contributions are followed by an index of fabliaux titles and another of the names of medieval authors, after which is Anne Cobby’s bibliography.
As the title of this collection suggests because it is in the form of a question, finding something new in and on fabliaux is challenging, in spite of how rich these texts are. Many of the contributions to this volume address the question of novelty by discussing fabliaux-adjacent texts. For example, the contributions by Baptiste Laïd and Pierreville argue for including within the corpus texts which are not traditionally defined as fabliaux, such as stories from Marie de France’s Fables and inserted stories in Renart le Contrefait, while otherwise skirting the issue of genre. Similarly, the last section on reception is also fabliaux-adjacent since the essays in this section tend to focus on later adaptations rather than the original fabliaux.
Analysing a genre that was composed between the late twelfth and the early fourteenth century necessarily implies temporal pitfalls. In discussing one author or one manuscript, the danger is to present one case as relevant to all fabliaux over the nearly 170-year period during which they flourished; on the other hand, making broad generalizations about all the identified tales risks overlooking important details in individual fabliaux or manuscripts, as well as the exceptional contributions of singular authors. This volume presents examples of both synchronic and diachronic approaches to the fabliaux, but it does not always avoid these pitfalls. For example, after an analysis of versification in MS Nottingham, UL, WLC/LM 6, which contains seven fabliaux attributed to Gautier le Leu and three other anonymous fabliaux, the author concludes that fabliaux writers in general are real writers, like those of other genres, who “maîtrisent parfaitement les ficelles du métier et font même preuve, ici ou là, de subtilité, voire de virtuosité dans leur art” (138) (master perfectly the tricks of their trade and even give proof here and there of subtlety, nay virtuosity in their art). On the one hand, limiting the corpus to--at most--four authors of thirteen texts in order to make claims about the stylistic merits of the genre as a whole seems misleading. On the other hand, is it still up for debate that the fabliaux are generally well-composed comic works by talented medieval “professionals”?
Surprising to this reviewer was the absence of references to certain studies, particularly in the first parts of the volume. In their introduction to the history of studies of fabliaux in French, Haugeard and Menegaldo fail to mention Philippe Ménard’s study, Les Fabliaux, contes à rire du Moyen Âge (1983), and Dominique Boutet’s Les Fabliaux (1985). In fact, the first references to each, Ménard on page 139 and Boutet on page 194, are both somewhat critical. In a similar vein, the essay by Laïd on fables and their relationship to fabliaux does not reference the book by Roy J. Pearcy, Logic and Humour in the Fabliaux (2007), where he discusses the very issue of the relationship between fables and fabliaux using one of Marie de France’s fables, something of a “fabliau avant la lettre,” in his first chapter (11-33). Moreover, in an essay that extensively explores the works of Jean Bodel in MS BnF fr. 837, the largest and most significant manuscript preserving fabliaux, the author fails to mention the work of Sylvie Lefèvre, who described the manuscript extensively in 2005. Challenging past criticism is certainly important, but neglecting it is troublesome.
This volume would have benefitted from some additional copy-editing. In addition to a handful of typos involving spelling, agreements, and prepositions, there are some more significant errors, such as the transposition of numbers for a manuscript reference on page 87, where an important manuscript containing fabliaux, MS D (BnF fr. 19152), is given instead as 19512; the names of the Dutch editors of the NRCF, the edition which almost all authors in the volume used, are misspelled as Van Noomen (251) rather than Noomen, and Boogaard (298) rather than van den Boogaard.
The great variety of approaches to the fabliaux contained in this volume lends itself well to scholars of different types of works as well as different time periods. For what they say about the fabliaux specifically, the essays are more suitable for specialists than students or those unfamiliar with the genre. The critical bibliography by Anne Cobby is, however, an invaluable addition to this collection and will certainly be serviceable to experts and neophytes alike.