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Medieval literature includes a great variety of comic tales, in both prose and verse, and in a variety of more or less distinct genres. For students of Chaucer, the most important comic genre is the fabliau (fabliau is the singular, fabliaux th ....

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... the middle and lower classes. Yet that representation only seems real; life did not run that high in actual fourteenth-century towns and villages -- it never does -- and the plots, convincing though they seem, frequently involve incredible degrees of gullibility in the victims and of ingenuity and sexual appetite in the trickster-heroes and -heroines. (The Riverside Chaucer, p. 7.) was, until Chaucer's time, a genre of French literature, in which it flourished in the thirteenth century. One of the minor problems about Chaucer's fabliaux is why he turned to a genre that had, in effect, been dead for a hundred years. Comic tales were very ...