The Fabliaux: The Crucified Priest | The Age of Cathedrals with R. Howard Bloch

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The fabliaux are the raunchy, streetwise flip side of the age of cathedrals: short comic tales in Old French where wit, timing, and money win out over almost everything else. Professor R. Howard Bloch introduces this urban genre, filled with merchants, students, and worldly priests, then reads "The Crucified Priest." A carver of crucifixes traps his wife's lover, who hides naked among the holy statues, and the joke turns on a sacred symbol reduced to an object bought and sold at market. Bloch sets the tale's comic castration against the metaphysical anguish of Abelard's, showing two very different Middle Ages side by side. Chapters: 00:00 Abelard and urban values 01:08 The fabliaux 02:22 The Crucified Priest 04:44 The husband's revenge 05:42 The moral of the tale 06:40 Sacred symbols as objects of exchange Learning objectives: After watching, you'll be able to: - Describe the fabliaux as a genre of urban comic tales - Summarize the plot and moral of "The Crucified Priest" - Analyze how the tale reduces a sacred symbol to an object of exchange - Contrast its comic castration with the seriousness of Abelard's 📚 About the Course: An introduction to some of the most astonishing architectural monuments the world has ever known: the Gothic cathedrals of medieval France. Through the art, literature, intellectual life, economics, and new social arrangements that arose in the shadow of the cathedrals, you will explore the revival of cities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

Published 2026-08-04 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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