Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English

by Jody Enders

Did you hear the one about the Mother Superior who was so busy casting the first stone that she got caught in flagrante delicto with her lover? What about the drunk with a Savior complex who was fool enough to believe himself to be the Second Coming? And that's nothing compared to what happens when comedy gets its grubby paws on the confessional. Enter fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French farce, the "bestseller" of a world that stands to tell us a lot about the enduring influence of a Shakespeare or a Molière. It's the sacrilegious world of Immaculate Deception , the third volume in a series of stage-friendly translations from the Middle French. Brought to you through the wonders of Open Access, these twelve engagingly funny satires target religious hypocrisy in that in-your-face way that only true slapstick can muster. There is literally nothing sacred.

Why this repertoire and why now? The current political climate has had dire consequences for the pleasures of satire at a cultural moment when we have never needed it more. It turns out that the proverbial Dark Ages had a lighter side; and France's over 200 rollicking, frolicking, singing, and dancing comedies—more extant than in any other vernacular—have waited long enough for their moment in the spotlight. They are seriously funny : funny enough to reclaim their place in cultural history, and serious enough to participate in the larger conversation about what it means to be a social influencer, then and now. Rather than relegate medieval texts to the dustbin of history, an unabashedly feminist translation can reframe and reject the sexism of bygone days by doing what theater always invites us to interpret, inflect, and adapt.

432 pages, Paperback

Published June 24, 2022

About the author

Jody Enders, Distinguished Professor of French, is a prize-winning theater historian and the author of 4 books of literary criticism: Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Cornell, 1992), which garnered the inaugural Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association; The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Cornell, 1999); Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago, 2002), recipient of the Barnard Hewitt Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research; and Murder by Accident (Chicago, 2009). A past Guggenheim fellow and editor of Theatre Survey, she has published numerous essays on the interplay of rhetoric, theater, medieval literature, performance theory, and the law, plus two edited volumes for Bloomsbury: A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages (2017); and A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages (2019). As the founder of the University of California’s Public Speaking Initiative, she is committed to the globalization of rhetoric, as in the reformed medieval rhetorical canon she sets forth in the Norton Anthology of Rhetoric of Rhetoric and Writing (forthcoming in 2025). Currently, she has turned joyously to translating scores of Middle-French farces into stage-friendly English. Four volumes have appeared thus far (with more to come): The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries (Penn, 2011), Holy Deadlock (Penn, 2017), Immaculate Deception (Penn, 2021), and Trial by Farce (Michigan 2023). According to the late great Terry Jones of Monty Python, she is “a great champion of comedy at its most vulgar and hilarious!”