Murphy Calculus

The Discourse of Marriage in the French Fabliaux and Chaucer's Shipman's Tale Murphy Calculus

revolve around love-triangles. The period of the popularity of the French fabliau coincides with two major changes in the organization of society. First, the beginning of a market economy triggered the emergence of a new social class, the bourgeoisie, associated with the development of towns in Northern France where the fabliaux were written. Second, the concept of Christian marriage was created as the Church gained control over the lay system of marriage, confirmed it a sacrament that required the consent and affection of both future spouses, and made the marriage indissoluble once consummated. The changes in marriage and the economy are well documented by historians, especially scholars in legal history and in economic history, but how these changes have shaped the French fabliaux is what this dissertation will explore. As will be more fully explained in Chapter Two, it took two centuries before the fabliaux were recognized as a legitimate corpus of texts worth studying. Scholarship concentrated on questions of origins, genre, and comedy. Regarded by scholars as too obscene, the fabliaux did not interest French or English scholars until the end of the nineteenth century. It also took a long time to undo the idea that the fabliaux were faithful representations of the behaviors of medieval people. As a literary genre, the fabliau was mostly compared to the romances and understood as a parody of their courtly attitudes as non-courtly people try unsuccessfully to emulate the behaviors of the courtly (Nykrog). Because of its subject matter and its comic aspects, the fabliaux characters were mostly considered stereotypes: the stupid husband, the lecherous priest, and the unruly wife, thus making it difficult for earlier scholars to explore these characters as representatives of the different classes in medieval society.