Page:Western Europe in the Middle Ages.djvu/199

Rh speeches which form a brief encyclopedia of thirteenth-century knowledge. The idealism of the earlier part of the poem vanishes; Jean is cynical and worldly-wise, especially on the subject of women. Yet medieval readers seemed untroubled by these discrepancies; all well-read men knew the poem and Chaucer, a century later, thought well enough of it to begin a translation into English.

Two other literary forms of the thirteenth century are important, Although some primitive dramatic compositions can be found earlier, the first fully developed medieval dramas come from the thirteenth century. Usually religious in content, they show that same desire for personifying abstract ideas or religious beliefs which we find in other writings of the period. Even more significant for understanding the contradictions in the society of the thirteenth century, are the fabliaux. These are short, satirical stories in verse, which exaggerate the real as much as allegory exaggerates the ideal. Their heroes are clever tricksters; their victims are the naive and the stupid. All women in the fabliaux are lustful; all priests are gluttons or lechers; most representatives of public authority are corrupt. The peasant who makes a fool of his priest, the woman who makes a fool of her husband, and the priest who makes a fool of his bishop are glorified. It is never wise to ascribe too much importance to satire, which by definition must exaggerate, but these stories have only one moral—enjoy yourself as much as you can without being caught. They leave the impression that the leadership of the Church was weakening and that medieval idealism was wearing thin.

With all its weaknesses, the literature of the thirteenth century was read by and influenced later generations. Its basic forms were imitated by the second-raters and perfected by the great writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Petrarch and Villon, Chaucer and Boccaccio used the forms and the plots of thirteenth-century lyrics and stories. Most of the great vernacular writers of die Renaissance drew from the same sources. Modern European