During the middle ages a common fund of comic tales circulated throughout Europe. Writers such as Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais and Cervantes drew on this material, and used it for their own purposes, but the brilliant medieval versions also deserve to be known in their own right. The tales in this collection come from France, Spain, Holland, Germany, Italy and England; they are of great cultural interest and considerable entertainment value, varying from humour to farce, from sophisticated literary parody to blunt ribaldry. Piety jostles blasphemy, and sex and death are everywhere good for a joke. A first collection of comic tales, published in 1973, was a great success. Most of those tales plus many more appear here in this much enlarged edition.