. Discipline that involves the study of daily life and material culture, symbolic systems, rituals, popular religion, folk medicine, judicial customs, performances, songs, tales, riddles, and many other aspects of life. The study of folklore—which draws on fields as diverse as literature, history, historical anthropology, ethnobotany, art and music history, and sociology—has shed considerable light on medieval French culture.
Historical anthropology, for example, has enabled us to undertake the excavation of a medieval folk culture no longer seen as a jumble of fragments but as an integrated worldview, acting on its environment through rituals and ceremonies and translating that experience through myth and legend. It has also stressed the specificity of the diverse ethnic components, regional cultures, and religious cultures that converged in the French Middle Ages. Archaeology has provided insights into the medieval rural world that have established foundations for understanding the relationship of material culture to beliefs. Examples are Bordenave and Vialle’s study of funerary objects and burial practices in the rural areas around Albi (1983) and Chapelot and Fossier’s 1980 study of villages that yielded information on patterns of settlement and human bonding. Linguistics is a kind of archaeology of words. Personal names and place-names, words for tools, plants, and trade techniques—all these help document material culture, as well as legends and the mental processes at work in word associations and word play. Facetious or derogatory surnames, for instance, are precious indicators of popular invective systems, exclusion patterns, and animal and plant symbolism.
Iconography is another important source. Its study was long dominated by Christian readings, but from the 1970s on scholarship illuminated the pagan or folk underpinnings of medieval sculptures in both ecclesiastical and secular buildings (e.g., Ross and Sheridan’s work on grotesques and gargoyles and the Krauses’ on misericords, both 1975). French cities, large and small, are richly adorned with symbolic and functional iconography. The densely coded language of street signs, known mostly through archival records, had been catalogued since the 19th century but not read with respect to folkloristics. Gaibenet’s pioneering work (1984) identified images previously thought of as simply bizarre or amusing. Manuscripts, capitals and portals of churches, corner pillars of houses, beams, and lintels came alive with a folk world rife with facetious saints, mythological creatures, wild men, mermaids, the Jack-O’Green, the four outcast sons of Aymon, but also with the symbols of folly and with obscene gestures to ward off evil, along with references to social customs, like the ius primae noctis.
Folk practices and customs are known through ample documentation. Letters of pardon refer to the organization of the calendar, feasts, and other aspects of religion. They bring us right into the worldview of the protagonists. A landmark in the study of medieval French folklore was Vaultier’s work on letters of pardon during the Hundred Years’ War (1965), which incorporated fragmentary information into the standard classification system of folklorists.
Another document of inestimable impact is the 15th-century Évangiles des quenoilles, a collection of aphorisms, medical recipes, charms, and beliefs attributed to a group of rural women who are presented as transmitting their knowledge through the sometimes bored or ironic cooperation of a scribe. Jeay’s 1982 study raised crucial issues of how to read “folk” against “clerical,” direct information against mediated, and how to exercise suspension of disbelief in handling such a source.
Literature provides a wealth of references to songs, legends, and proverbs. Though folk music, like all medieval music, is one of the hardest domains to document, song texts were embedded in medieval narratives and in separate collections, such as the chansons de toile. The function of orality in the formation, composition, and transmission of many medieval fictional narratives has been the subject of long debate. This is particularly true of the chanson de geste; the study of its formulaic composition, facilitated by Duggan’s use of computers, has prompted serious rethinking of the relationship between oral and written composition and of blithe characterizations of a genre as uniquely “aristocratic” or “popular.”
The extensive corpus of exempla, catalogued by Tubach (1969), is replete with material from oral tradition and has generated a renewed interest in the sources and variations of complex folktale cycles and of the relationships and tensions between folk culture and its clerical voicing. The study of hagiography allows us to differentiate saints’ cults that can be deemed truly popular from those cults generated from above; an example is historical anthropologist Jean-Claude Schmitt’s 1983 study of the local cult of a deceased dog “canonized” by the folk. Feminist studies, often coming from a social-science or art-history perspective, have played a major role in the development of this aspect of medieval folklore, broadening its definition beyond traditional distinctions of rural-urban or elite-folk to include the communities of women. Ashley and Sheingorn, for instance, begin their volume of essays on the place of St. Anne in late-medieval society by stating that their perspective is at the intersection of popular culture, popular piety, and women’s studies, informed by cultural and gender studies, and attempts to bridge the gap between popular and elite cultures, between folklore and theology.
The foregoing represents just a sampling of French medieval-folklore scholarship, making reference to trends and issues that reflect to the greatest possible extent on the whole. Other areas that have been studied include public performance, carnival plays and other rituals, fraternities, the folklore of trades, folk medicine, fools and folly, witchcraft and the Devil, demons and ghosts, the legends of Melusine the serpent and Hellekin, leader of the unquiet dead, and tales of Roland leaving his mark on the landscape.
Though fully recognized as a discipline only in the past few decades, the study of medieval French folklore has a venerable history. One of the earliest explicit attempts at gathering folklore from primary sources in an organized way was the 16th-century doctor Laurent Joubert’s Erreurs populaire au fait de la médecine et régime de santé, whose 1576 edition included catalogues of sundry medical beliefs entitled Propos vulgaires, or sayings from the untutored, gleaned at his behest by friends and colleagues. Satirical depictions of Catholic folk practices by Protestant writers and polemicists, such as the erudite Henri Estienne (Apologie pour Hérodote), also provided useful insights into the folk religion of the time.
Medieval French folklore became a more densely charted sea with the 19th-century development of folklore studies throughout Europe, in the intellectual context of Romanticism. The upsurge of Germanic nationalism profoundly affected French folklore studies, since German scholars happily annexed France to Germanic culture. An important example of this approach is found in Liebrecht’s notes to a partial edition of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, entitled Ein Beitrag zu deutsches Mythologie (1856), a comparative study of medieval traditions with a medley of modern west European folk traditions, many of them French.
Throughout the 19th century, scholarly journals, national, regional, and local, published a plethora of articles on aspects of medieval French folklore, in which philology was dominant. Such medievalists as Joseph Bédier, Gaston Raynaud, and Paul Meyer focused on the role of medieval French fabliaux and other tales in the formation and transmission of the corpus of folktales and legends. Much attention was directed to the question of attributing Indian origins to European tales, and medieval tales generally; such was the argument in Bédier’s Fabliaux and in Cosquin’s 1911 study of the tale of “The Cat and the Candle” (Romania 40). Studies on Old French explained façons de dire—sayings, idiomatic expressions—and helped explicate the extended meaning of words and the beliefs underpinning them. Meyer and others also devoted attention to medieval medicine and its relationship to folk practices. In the early 19th century, extensive collections of miscellaneous texts were published: comic plays, debates, pamphlets, and broadsides, many of them connected to carnival and other popular feasts. The Romanian folklorist Sainéan studied the history of French slang; the polymath Francisque Michel’s commentaries on the races maudites—pariah communities, such as the cagots, the presumed descendants of lepers—albeit now obsolete in scope and method, raised a question of folk culture and French history that is still discussed by medieval historians.
The early 20th century saw giant leaps in French folkloristics. Van Gennep’s Manuel de folklore français contemporain (1937–58), still the standard work, provided the calendar and festive structure for the study of isolated folklore manifestations; his discussion included medieval examples. Saintyves, concerned with the survival of pagan practices, treated many themes of medieval hagiography in connection with folklore, such as the cult of St. Christopher, the symbolism of leprosy, virgin births, and protective processions around cities. Another landmark was Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch (1924; trans. 1973). A historian of the of the economic and social relations of feudalism, Bloch studied the healing powers of kings, exploring the connection among the political rituals of the monarchy, its religious content, and the practices of the folk.
Bloch’s advances in bringing the discipline of history into the study of medieval folklore and Vaultier’s reliance on letters of pardon did not have their full impact until much later, with the “New History.” The historian Jacques Le Goff favored a multidisciplinary approach to history that included folklore and its methodologies as valid tools. In his Time, Work and Culture (1980), Le Goff discussed the function of blood tabus in certain professions, the connection between official processions and folk religion, dragon lore, and the myth of Melusine, the serpent-tailed woman of dynastic foundation legends. Focused on a specific area and regional culture, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1978) also joined folklore and history. Based on a 14th-century inquisitor’s records of a heresy-hunting expedition in a previously Cathar-Albigensian region, Ladurie combined ethnology, sociology, anthropology, and folklore as domains of the historian. He classified the behaviors of the people of Montaillou according to recognizable folklore categories and discussed beliefs within the broader context afforded by a comparative folkloristic view.
In the 1970s, the study of popular religion and popular religious sensitivity accelerated. The use of clerical writers, theologians, and even inquisitors was being recognized as an important means of retrieving fragments of folk culture. Essays on Languedoc in the 13th and 14th centuries, by Étienne Delaruelle, Bernard Plongeron, and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Cahiers de Fanjeaux 11 [1985]), examined the saints, feasts, legends, and amulets of popular piety. Ethnologist Claude Gaignebet’s Art profane et religion populaire (1985) was a syncretic rereading of medieval culture and folklore in which iconography, myth, custom, and literature combined to underscore the pivotal importance of time, the folk calendar, and myth. He reopened the forbidden dossier of obscenity in art and culture, stressed the popular foundations of great texts of medieval literature, and incorporated isolated folk practices into systems of myth and religion, parallel but not always opposed to Christianity. Symbolic and mythical readings of the folk calendar were furthered in Philippe Walter’s studies of time and hagiography in medieval narratives, and his dictionary of Christian mythology (1992) provides a useful summary of medieval folklore, myth, and ritual.
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth Century, trans. Martin Thom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Walter, Philippe. Mythologie chrétienne: rites et mythes du moyen âge. Paris: Entente, 1992.
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