Jean Bodel (c. 1165 – c. 1210), also spelled Jehan Bodel, was an Old French poet who wrote a number of chansons de geste as well as many fabliaux. He lived in Arras.
Jean Bodel (c. 1165 – c. 1210), also spelled Jehan Bodel, was an Old French poet who wrote a number of chansons de geste as well as many fabliaux. He lived in Arras.
A fabliau (French pronunciation: [fabljo]; plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs and clerics in France between c. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes generally critical or mocking of the church and nobility. While most fabliaux were anonymous, we do know some authors like Jean Bodel or Guèrin, who wrote during the peak of the genre's popularity. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decameron and by Geoffrey Chaucer for The Canterbury Tales. Some 150 French fabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined. According to R. Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism in Europe.
Some nineteenth-century scholars, most notably Gaston Paris, argue that fabliaux originally came from the Orient and were brought to the West by returning crusaders.
According to the medieval poet Jean Bodel, the Matter of Rome (French: matière de Rome; Latin: Res Romana) is the literary cycle of Greek and Roman mythology, together with episodes from the history of classical antiquity, focusing on military heroes like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Bodel's division of literary cycles also included the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain (although "non-cyclical" romance also existed). The Matter of Rome includes the Matter of Troy, consisting of romances and other texts based on the Trojan War and its legacy, including the adventures of Aeneas.