Note on the Fabliaux
Introduction. Obscenity in medieval culture and literature
part I. Fourteen-century pioneers
1. Comedy and critique : obscenity and Langland's reproof of established powers in Piers Plowman
2. Chaucer's poetics of the obscene : classical narrative and fabliau politics in fragment one of the Canterbury tales and The legend of good women
Part II. Fifteenth-century heirs
3. The henpecked subject : misogyny, poetry, and masculine community in the writing of John Lydgate
4. "Ryth Wikked" : Christian ethics and the unruly holy woman in the Book of Margery Kempe
5. Women's work, companionate marriage, and mass death in the biblical drama
Conclusion. Lessons of the medieval obscene.