Medieval French Literature - Other Forms

Other Forms

A large body of fables survive in Old French; these include (mostly anonymous) literature dealing with the recurring trickster character of Reynard the Fox. Marie de France was also active in this genre, producing the Ysopet (Little Aesop) series of fables in verse.

Related to the fable was the more bawdy "fabliau", which covered topics such as cuckolding and corrupt clergy. These "fabliaux" would be an important source for Chaucer and for the Renaissance short story ("conte" or "nouvelle").

Satire was also written during this period, including the Roman de Fauvel, which mocks the sins of humanity by making the Seven Deadly Sins appear in the personification of a horse.

The prose satire Les XV joies de mariage (The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, first published 1480-90, written perhaps in the early 15th century, and attributed variously to Antoine de la Sale, Gilles Bellemère the bishop of Avignon, and many others) is a riotous critique of wives (typical of misogynistic literature of the period), but it also provides important insight into the economic and social life of a married household in the 15th century.

Prose compositions in the Middle Ages—other than the prose versions of romances and "chansons de geste"—include a number of histories and chronicles, of which the most famous are those of Robert de Clari and Geoffroy de Villehardouin (both on the Fourth crusade of 1204 and the capture of Constantinople), Jean de Joinville (on Saint Louis IX of France), Jean Froissart (on the wars of the 14th century) and Philippe de Commines and Enguerrand de Monstrelet (on the troubles of the 15th century). Philippe de Mézières wrote "Songe du Vieil Pelerin" (1389), an elaborate allegorical voyage in which he described the customs of Europe and the near East.