noun
definition
A short, farcical, often bawdy tale of a genre written in the North of France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.
Examples of fabliaux in a Sentence
The Cursor Mundi had turned religious history into something not very different from a romance of chivalry, and in the stories of Handlyng Synne the influence of the fabliaux is not far to seek.
The common origin of them all is to be found in the old French fabliaux, though some well-known tales are evidently Eastern, and others classical.
He also edited Gregory Lewis Way's translation of select Fabliaux in 1796.
The naturalism of which we have been speaking found free utterance now in the fabliaux of jongleurs, lyrics of minnesingers, tales of trouveres, romances of Arthur and his knights - compositions varied in type and tone, but in all of which sincere passion and real enjoyment of life pierce through the thin veil of chivalrous mysticism or of allegory with which they were sometimes conventionally draped.
Boccaccio's tales, in like manner, continue the tradition of the fabliaux, raising that literary species to the rank of finished art, enriching it with humour and strengthening its substance by keen insight into all varieties of character.
The best verses, Pontano's elegies, Politian's hexameters, were in like manner Latin; public orations upon ceremonial occasions were delivered in the Latin tongue; correspondence, official and familiar, was carried on in the same language; even the fabliaux received, in Poggio's Facetiae.
The fabliaux, the early burlesque romances of the Audigier class, the farces of the t5th century, equal (the grotesque iteration and amplification which is the note of Gargantua and Pantagruel being allowed for, and sometimes without that allowance) the coarsest passages of Rabelais.
In literature he embraced the whole sphere of contemporary studies, and distinguished himself as an orator, a writer of rhetorical treatises, a panegyrist of the dead, a violent impugner of the living, a translator from the Greek, an epistolographer and grave historian and a facetious compiler of fabliaux in Latin.