Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome

merchants, lawyers and civil servants. Though the existence of a tripartite social hierarchy (clergy, aristocracy and the rest) might suggest separate literary constituencies, the notion of a ‘public’ for literature is difficult to define. About 40 per cent of chansons de geste begin with variants of ‘Oiez, seignor’, which seems to imply a noble audience, yet they often proceed to explain basic chivalric rules as if for the benefit and instruction of less exalted listeners. After 1200, romances in verse