Joseph Bédier (28 January 1864 – 29 August 1938) was a French writer and historian of medieval France.

[citation needed] Bédier revived interest in several important old French texts, including Tristan et Iseut (1900), La chanson de Roland (1921), and Les fabliaux (1893).

His Le roman de Tristan et Iseut was translated into Cornish by A. S. D. Smith, into English by Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld, and into German by Rudolf G. Binding.

Bédier was also joint editor of the two-volume Littérature française, one of the most valuable modern general histories of French literature.

From them Bédier connected together accounts of thirty-six incidents of what he saw as sexual and sadistic crimes by the German soldiers.