"Desperate Housewives" has nothing on the Middle Ages.

A new translation of comic French poems written in the 13th and 14th centuries and known as the fabliaux will be published by the W. W. Norton imprint Liveright next month, marking the first time these saucy poems are available to English readers in a single major collection.

The poems, many with unprintable names, offer a glimpse into the Middle Ages that has nothing to do with courtly love, warring knights or church teachings. Instead they show cuckolded husbands, randy priests, lusty women—and a fondness for scatological humor.

The fabliaux are filled with puns, clever rhyme schemes, dirty words and double entendres. But they are also a serious work of literature that are at the root of the Western comic tradition. They inspired Geoffrey Chaucer, whose "Canterbury Tales" contain five fabliaux, and Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron" draws on them as well, says Yale University French professor R. Howard Bloch, who wrote the introduction to the collection. The volume was translated by Nathaniel E. Dubin, a professor emeritus of modern classical languages at the College of Saint Benedict and St. John's University in Minnesota.

These racy poems shed light on the lives of regular people in medieval times. "This shows the common people being as down and dirty as you can get. It will change people ideas about the Middle Ages as dark and church-bound and unknowable," says Mr. Bloch. "The fabliaux are similar in many ways to soaps," says Mr. Dubin. "They deal with issues and problems on people's minds, and focus on the infidelities and lies and trickeries that people commit on one another to reflect changing mores."