That the tales of the Decameron owe much to the Old French fabliaux is among the more frequently invoked truisms of Boccaccio studies. Like so many truths that are held to be self-evident, this particular truth has not only eluded critical scrutiny, but has escaped any systematic elaboration. While ready enough to concede that various novelle recycle themes drawn from the fabliaux, critics, in Katherine A. Brown’s view, have failed to recognize the more profound and far-reaching structural influence that the fabliaux have exerted on Boccaccio’s masterpiece. If the title of Brown’s monograph, Boccaccio’s Fabliaux, clearly announces her intention to compensate this critical oversight, its subtitle, Medieval Short Stories and the Function of Reversal, just as clearly advertises the specific nature of this hitherto-unrecognized influence: reversal.

A highly technical anatomy of the fabliau designed to reveal that reversal — parsed into its various types and subtypes — is a defining feature of the fabliau genre, the first chapter of Brown’s study makes for arduous reading; however, the effort is soon rewarded by the more accessible and highly suggestive arguments made in the following three chapters. The second chapter proposes that the fabliaux-containing codices, often viewed as more or less haphazard compilations or miscellanies, are actually ordered anthologies in which the fabliaux, artfully interwoven among various other genres, introduce a disruptive element that opens up the text to different interpretations. In addition to furnishing a useful overview of the medieval short-narrative collections and associated framing devices, the third chapter identifies a fusion of Eastern and Western structural and thematic elements in these collections that may have served as a precedent for Boccaccio’s similar integrative procedure in the Decameron. The fourth chapter — a careful examination of the thematic, lexical, syntactic, and larger structural similarities between selected Decameron stories and fabliaux — argues that Boccaccio was well acquainted with these particular fabliaux and that he not only reproduced their themes, but also their sophisticated strategies of reversal.

Though Brown’s almost exclusive focus on the Decameron may seem to be a sensible decision given the numerous similarities between the Old French fabliau (and fabliaux codices) and the Boccaccian novella (and the Decameron), the effect of this restrictive approach is to artificially reinforce the genetic link between the two — conveniently overlooking the fact that the Decameron did not drop, fully formed, from the ether, but was the culminating expression of more than a decade of prolific vernacular production marked by an often-radical experimentalism. Indeed, most of the formal traits that Brown attributes to the influence of the fabliaux and fabliaux anthologies — reversal, inversion, generic synthesis, fusion of opposites, and so forth — are already defining characteristics of Boccaccio’s pre-Decameron production. Nor are innovative frame structures lacking in these youthful vernacular works. While Brown’s suggestion that “the Seven Sages tradition furnishes the most likely model of a frame narrative for Boccaccio” (92–93) is a tempting conjecture, the long-noted connection between the Decameron frame and the “Questions of Love” interlude in the Filocolo (4, 14–70) is beyond doubt, and clearly points to the Provençal poetic debates (tenson, partimen) and the love disputes of Andreas Capellanus’s Art of Love 2.7 as likely sources for some of those same traits — an emphasis on dialectic, semantic ambiguity, and multiplicity of interpretations — that Brown attributes to the influence of the fabliaux. Did, as Brown tantalizingly argues, Boccaccio’s intimate acquaintance with the fabliaux catalyze the shift from didactic to hermeneutic priorities attested throughout the Decameron, or were these priorities nourished by a wider range of literary sources and life experiences?

If this failure to consider the larger context of Boccaccio’s vernacular works is the principal weakness of Brown’s study, its greatest strength is to have convincingly shown the revolutionary nature of the fabliau, a genre that burst onto the literary stage in the twelfth century to lead Western European readers from their long-standing bondage to moralizing, prescriptive texts to the freedom of scatological romps and subjective judgments, and from the tyranny of a deadening literalism to the liberty of ambiguity and polysemy. Whether or not Boccaccio’s Decameron is as profoundly indebted to the fabliaux as she would have us believe, Brown has successfully demonstrated that both are animated by the same maverick spirit and adhere to the same faith: an ardent love of language, a true philology.