Boccaccio’s Fabliaux: Medieval Short Stories and the Function of Reversal by Katherine A. Brown (review)

The wonderful abundance of medieval short stories as fashioned in a host of forms, written from the twelfth through the fourteenth century, serves as a backstory for Boccaccio’s Fabliaux: Medieval Short Stories and the Function of Reversal. In this thoroughly researched and well-cited book, Katherine A. Brown explores extensively the literary evolution of the popular fabliau genre as an influential element in the short narrative form used in Boccaccio’s collection of novellas. Brown argues that Boccaccio took the popular fabliau form beyond the mere thematic to inform the structure of the Decameron. To that end, Brown considers an accounting of the codices that contain fabliaux, a listing of possible avenues that inform the Decameron, and a cataloguing of the order the novellas as presented in the Decameron.

In chapter 1, “Fabliaux Reversals and La Grue,” Brown defines the essence of several forms of reversals found in the fabliau form and how “reversal” functions as one of its key features and can function outside the contemporary short story genre. Brown connects and divides these reversals into three types. The first type, the rhetorical reversal, addresses the meta-textual chiasmus in the fabliau, specifically from a perspective of comedy. The second type, the narrative reversal, looks to oppositional pairings, and three subtypes: the sociogenic order, the parodic order, and the ill-fitting proverbs. The final type of reversal, the structural, considers the inversion of the fabliaux material. Brown makes an argument that Boccaccio employed these various fabliaux, combining differing genres such as exempla and lais, and then through the reversal process places his own versions into the context of the Decameron. Brown makes an extensive analysis of Le Fablel de la Grue as the primary model text that shows all three types of reversals. Lastly, Brown points to the “Tower Motif” in context of Western and Eastern confluence in such tales as “Yonec” and “Guigemar” and in such romances as Le Chevalier de la Charrette. Brown ends by examining the ordering of these texts within serval codices.

In the second chapter, “Fabliaux in Context (BnF fr. 2173),” Brown considers the relevance of principles of organization. This context in which the fabliaux functioned, especially from a rhetorical and structural standpoint as found in a single manuscript, Brown works to explain how the diversity of genres complement the fabliaux itself, making a literary whole. In particular, Brown investigates the genre’s didactic purposes, which would enable the genre to be reused and repurposed by many various authors living in that time period, but in particular how Boccaccio may have chosen to re-work these purposes.

Brown’s structure thereby functions in two sections. The first two chapters define and outline the distinctive qualities of a fabliau, especially as separated from other contemporary medieval short stories, and the order of these texts within the extant codices we have today. The final two chapters make the argument how those qualities may have influenced the actual re-writing and repurposing performed by Boccaccio.

In the third chapter, “Medieval Story Collections and Framing Devices,” Brown examines the influence of Eastern compilations of stories as they appeared in the Western anthologies, beginning in the twelfth century. These influential compilations of the fabliaux, argues Brown, subsequently informed the works of Boccaccio via a tradition of the frame narrative, particularly in how he would structure the order and purpose of the short story in the Decameron. In particular, Brown looks to the relevance of the Eastern frame narratives, such as the Seven Sages of Rome and Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis (Arabic and Persian works translated from Arabic to Latin), and Western stories found in manuscripts written prior to the Decameron. Brown argues the fabliaux prefigured the selection of stories told over the ten days of storytelling, but in particular how this frame, as it works outside the narrative, and the cornice as it integrates within the narrative. Brown examines more closely these...