Beginning of Essay
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 the plural). Chaucer's ....

Middle of Essay
.... 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 popular in Chaucer's time, but the more sophisticated were almost always in prose (as in the case of Boccaccio's Decameron). Chaucer had no models in English, and despite the vivid ....