The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fabliau \Fa`bli`au"\, n.; pl. Fabliaux (-[-o]"). [F., fr. OF.fablel, dim. of fable a fable.] (Fr. Lit.) One of the metrical tales of the Trouv[`e]res, or early poets of the north of France.
Wiktionary
n. The genre of short, farcical often coarse tales written in the North of France in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.
Wikipedia
A fabliau (plural fabliaux) is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes—contrary to the church and to the nobility. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decameron and by Geoffrey Chaucer for his 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 come from the Orient and were brought to the West by returning crusaders
Usage examples of "fabliau".
Mr Bell gives the outline of a fabliau, of which three versions existed, and in which a contention between two ladies regarding the merits of their respective lovers, a knight and a clerk, is decided by Cupid in a Court composed of birds, which assume their sides according to their different natures.