Com base no detalhado exame dos calembours disseminados na obra, Guiraud sugeriu que o autor empirico pudesse ter sido um membro da
basoche, cujas relacoes com o teatro burlesco da epoca sao conhecidas (KOOPMANS; VERHUYCK, 1987, p.
The Lucifer episode, in which this slippery figure makes elaborately specious arguments, dallies with dubious allegorical characters, and is crowned "king of the world," creates a parodie spectacle that recalls the traditions of local festive societies and associations of law clerks (
basoche societies), which shared many performative practices, including mounting comic plays and yearly electing their "kings" in public ceremonies.
Tous deux adresses aux "amis," ils mettent en place une nouvelle sociabilite intellectuelle, partagee par la generation des etudiants qui ont connu les guerres et assistent au debat religieux instaure par Erasme, qui explorent la rencontre en langues vernaculaires et langues classiques, qui se fient a la
Basoche, rient aux aventures de Pantagruel, et croient en un avenir moderne et savant tout a la fois.
In urban centres, the
Basoche, organizations of law clerks, enacted similar social performances: they "planted May bushes, pleaded mock cases, and put on public comedies and farces at Mardi Gras in which read persons, in their jurisdiction and out of it, were represented and their faults derided" (111).
Beam's focus is primarily the plays and farces performed by university students and the less exalted members of the law courts such as clerks, ushers, and notaries, collectively referred to as the
basoche. These farcical performances were largely comedies and evoked great laughter.
Chapters three and seven are particularly concerned with the relatively under discussed form of student drama, in their respective investigations of mid-sixteenth-century performances by the
Basoche and by university students, and of Jesuit theatre as a seventeenth-century forum for Christian civility and absolutism.
The chapter recounting the clashes between the Bordelais
basoche (young lawyers-in-training and lesser officials associated with the Parlement of Bordeaux) through their Confraternity of Saint-Yves and the Protestant-inclined students of that city's College de Guyenne is fascinating.
En 1461 le Feu Dauphin, devenu le Roi de France Louis XI, sous le conseil de Charles d'Orleans et a l'occasion d'un voyage solennel a Meung, a elargi de prison le poete en rupture de ban Francois Villon, en depit de l'Eveque Inquisiteur, mais a la satisfaction du Quartier Latin et de la
Basoche..
In his 1970 book Le Testament de Villon ou le gai savoir de la
Basoche, the French philologist Pierre Guiraud argued convincingly that, far from being autobiographical, both The Legacy and The Testament were coded satires based on an elaborate verbal system and were in fact what he termed "judicial farces." The poems arose, he argued, out of the dramatic performances staged in the close-knit world of "La
Basoche" the rather disreputable legal confraternities of Villon's Paris.