SOURCE: “Wisdom Buildeth a Hut: Aucassin et Nicolette as Christian Comedy,” in Allegorica, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 250-68.

In the following essay, Clark and Wasserman contend that Aucassin et Nicolette is better described as an instructional allegory than a parody, in that it uses inversion to highlight the absurdity of human sin.

As a result of the growing critical awareness that irony was not an art mislaid by medieval writers until it was “rediscovered” by the Renaissance,¹ many romances, such as those of Chrétien de Troyes, are now recognized as parodies of a form which they were at first thought to trace out so mindlessly.² Yet in compensating for the previously ill-conceived charges of naivete, there may be the danger of reducing many a fine romance to little more than a belly laugh at the expense of the traditional genre. Such has been the case with Aucassin...