This poor guy just wanted to plow his field in peace. But one thing led to another—an unwanted marriage, a suspicious priest, a strategic beating—and suddenly he's the kingdom’s most celebrated doctor, despite knowing nothing about medicine except how to get hit with a stick until inspiration strikes.

In Le Vilain mire, medicine is just violence with better PR, and a man with zero qualifications ends up outwitting an entire kingdom. This is what happens when you lie confidently and commit.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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In La Coille Noire, a wife takes her husband to court over the scandalous discovery that his testicles are black.

Cue a trial full of confusion, comedy, and anatomical misunderstandings, as the bishop tries to make sense of it all. 

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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Warning: private parts are about to go public.

In Garin's infamous Le Chevalier Qui Fesoit Les Cons Parler, a down-on-his-luck knight is gifted the bizarre magical ability to make women's genitals (and if necessary, their anuses) speak the truth. As he travels from tournaments to courts, this strange power causes chaos, confession, and courtly mayhem. 

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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In Freire Denise le cordelier, Rutebeuf offers a poetic takedown of every dude who uses God to get laid. A teenage girl dreams of holy life; a Franciscan friar sees an opportunity. Disguised as “Brother Denise,” she enters the monastery—and his bed—until a sharp noblewoman spots the girl under the tonsure.

A darkly comic tale of religious abuse, drag, and divine retribution, this is one of the medieval period’s most brutal friar exposés.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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In Le sentier batu, Jean de Condé tells the story of a knight who gets roasted at a party by the woman he once hoped to marry—and absolutely cooks her back. A lesson in why public shame is a blade that cuts both ways—and why some roads are better left untraveled.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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When a well-dressed knight visits his lover while her husband is at court, all goes to plan—until the husband unexpectedly returns. What follows is a spiraling comedy of cover-ups, in which the lady spins a web of lies so convincing she not only protects her secret lover but manages to convince her husband that he’s possessed, demented, and in need of a religious pilgrimage.

In Le chevalier à la robe vermeille, Jean de Condé delivers a classic fabliau of adultery, gaslighting and proof that red really is the most dangerous color.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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In Berangier au lonc cul, Guérin (the creative mastermind behind this amazing story) delivers a humiliating farce about one man's lie, one woman’s vengeance, and one monumental butt.

This knight might wear armour, but his guts are all gone—literally scared into kissing what he thought was a man’s “long butthole.”

That’s right: the title is not a metaphor.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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When a miserly hunchback marries far above his station, his obsession with control meets its match in his wife's quick wits and a sturdy bed with three drawers. In Les iii boçus, bodies pile up, a porter loses his mind, and a husband learns (posthumously) that money can’t buy loyalty. One of the fabliaux’s tightest murder farces, this is slapstick with a corpse count.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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In L’evesque qui beneï le con, the bishop of Bayeux learns the hard way that abusing power for sex can blow up in your face—especially when the woman’s husband is hiding behind the bed, waiting to say Amen. 

God sees everything, and so does the guy behind the curtain.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

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When God made the world, He gave jobs to knights, peasants, and priests—and forgot the whores and the entertainers. So they complained. The result? Harlots got Church patronage, jugglers got tossed some bones, and the moral order of the universe got pantsed in public.

Jean de Condé’s Des putains et des lecheors is divine bureaucracy at its pettiest.

📜 Text: Translation by Nathaniel E. Dubin

🎵 Title music: “Celebration” by Alexander Nakarada

📲 Updates & mischief: @kpethainou.bsky.social | @thecourtjesterpodcast on Facebook

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