Marie de France

For the two French princess Marie, see Marie of France, Countess of Champagne and Marie of France, Duchess of Brabant.

Marie de France
Marie de France from an illuminated manuscript
Born	Brittany
Nationality	French
Period	Medieval
Genres	Lais, Fables, Saints' Lives
Influences Ovid, Aesop

Marie de France ("Mary of France") was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an undisclosed court, but was almost certainly at least known about at the royal court of King Henry II of England. Virtually nothing is known of her life; both her given name and its geographical specification come from her manuscripts, though one contemporary reference to her work and popularity remains.

Marie de France wrote a form of Anglo-Norman French, and was evidently proficient in Latin and English as well. She is the author of the Lais of Marie de France. She translated Aesop's Fables from Middle English into Anglo-Norman French and wrote Espurgatoire seint Partiz, Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, based upon a Latin text. Recently she has been (tentatively) identified as the author of a saint's life, The Life of Saint Audrey. Her Lais in particular were and still are widely read, and influenced the subsequent development of the romance genre.

Life and works

The actual name of the author known to us as Marie de France is unknown; she has acquired this nom de plume from a line in one of her published works: "Marie ai num, si sui de France," which translates as "My name is Marie, and I am from France."^[1] Some of the most commonly-proposed suggestions for the identity of this twelfth century poet are: Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury and half-sister to Henry II, King of England; Marie, Abbess of Reading; Marie de Boulogne;^[2] Marie, Abbess of Barking;^[3][4] and Marie de Meulan, wife of Hugh Talbot.^[5][6][7]

Four works, or collections of works, have been attributed to Marie de France. She is principally known for her authorship of The Lais of Marie de France, a collection of twelve narrative poems, mostly of a few hundred lines each. She claims in the preambles to most of these Breton lais that she has heard the stories they contain from Breton minstrels, and it is in the opening lines of the poem Guigemar that she first reveals her name to be Marie. One hundred and two "Ysopet" fables have also been attributed to her, in addition to a retelling of the Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick and recently, a saint's life called La Vie seinte Audree about Saint Audrey of Ely.

Scholars have dated Marie's works to between about 1160 and 1215, these being the earliest and latest possible dates respectively. It is probable that the Lais were written in the late twelfth century; they are dedicated to a "noble king", usually assumed to be Henry II of England, or possibly his eldest son, Henry the Young King. Another of her works, the Fables, is dedicated to a "Count William", who may have been either William of Mandeville or William Marshall. However, it has also been suggested that Count William may refer to William Longsword. Longsword was a recognized illegitimate son of Henry II. If Marie was actually Henry II's half-sister, a dedication to his son, and therefore her nephew, might be understandable.^[8]

It is likely that Marie de France was known at the court of King Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine.^[9] A contemporary of Marie, the English poet Denis Piramus, mentions in his Life of Saint Edmund the King, written in around 1180, the lais of a Marie which were popular in aristocratic circles. She was first given the name Marie de France by the French scholar Claude Fauchet in 1551, in his Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise, and this name has been used ever since.^[10]

The presence of an Anglo-Norman dialect in her writings and the survival of many of her texts in England "suggest that she lived in England during her adult life," but that she was born in France, possibly in Brittany.^[2] The signification of the phrase "si sui de France", however, is ambiguous and equivocal when applied to the 12th century. France was a word used to signify Paris and Île-de-France when used on the continent. Marie may possibly not have stated that she was from France if she was originally from a region governed by Henry II such as Brittany, Normandy, Anjou or Aquitaine, unless she had been thoroughly anglicized.

It is even possible that when Marie says that she comes from France in the Fables, she means that she lives in Île-de-France and that this is where she is writing, perhaps on the borders of Normandy, with a broad readership and audience in mind.^[11] Three of the five surviving manuscript copies of the Lais are written in continental French and British Library MS Harley 978, written in Anglo-Norman French in the mid-thirteenth century, may reflect the dialect of the copiest.^[11]

Breton lais

Main articles: Lais of Marie de France and Breton lai

Breton lais were certainly in existence before Marie de France chose to recast the themes she heard from Breton minstrels into poetic narratives in Anglo-Norman verse, but she may have been the first to present a "new genre of the lai in narrative form."^[12] The lais of Marie de France had a huge impact on the literary world.^[13] They were considered a new type of literary technique derived from classical rhetoric and imbued with such detail that they became a new form of art. Marie may have filled her detailed poems with imagery so that her audience would easily remember them. Her lais range in length from 118 (Chevrefoil) to 1,184 lines (Eliduc),^[14] frequently describe courtly love entangled in love triangles involving loss and adventure, and "often take up aspects of the merveilleux, and at times intrusions from the fairy world."^[15] The setting for Marie's lais is the Celtic world, embracing England, Wales, Ireland, Brittany and Normandy^[9][15]

Only five manuscripts containing some or all of Marie’s lais now exist, and the only one to include the general prologue and all twelve lais is British Library MS Harley 978. This may be contrasted with the twenty-five manuscripts with Marie's Fables, perhaps reflecting their relative popularity in the late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, Marie's lais have received much more critical attention in recent times.

Love

In most of Marie de France’s Lais, love is associated with suffering and over half of them involve an adulterous relationship.^[16] In Bisclavret and Equitan, the adulterous lovers are severely condemned but there is evidence that Marie approved of extramarital affairs under certain circumstances: "When the deceived partner has been cruel and merits deception and when the lovers are loyal to one another.”^[17] In Marie's Lais, "love always involves suffering and frequently ends in grief, even when the love itself is approved.”^[18]

Marie's lovers are usually isolated and relatively unconcerned with anything outside the immediate cause of their distress, whether it be a jealous husband or an envious society. However, "the means of overcoming this suffering is beautifully and subtly illustrated.”^[19] "Marie concentrates on the individuality of her characters and is not very concerned with their integration into society. If society does not appreciate the lovers, then the lovers die or abandon society, and society is the poorer for it.”^[20]

Defying Church traditions

Marie de France’s lais not only portray a gloomy outlook on love, they also defied the traditions of love within the Church at the time. She wrote about adulterous affairs, women of high stature who seduce other men, women seeking escape from a loveless marriage, often to an older man, which gave the idea that women can have sexual freedom. She wrote lais, many of which seemed to endorse sentiments that were contrary to the traditions of the Church, and especially the idea of virginal love and marriage. The lais also exhibit the idea of a stronger female role and power. In this, she may have inherited ideas and norms from the troubadour love songs that were common at the Angevin courts of England, Aquitaine, Anjou and Brittany; songs in which the heroine "is a contradictory symbol of power and inarticulacy; she is at once acutely vulnerable and emotionally overwhelming, irrelevant and central."^[21] Marie's heroines are often the instigators of events, but events that often end in suffering.

The heroines in Marie's Lais are often imprisoned. This imprisonment may take the form of actual incarceration by elderly husbands, as in Yonec, and in Guigemar where the lady who becomes Guigemar's lover is kept behind the walls of a castle which faces the sea, or "merely of close surveillance, as in Laustic, where the husband, who keeps a close watch on his wife when he is present, has her watched equally closely when he is away from home.”^[22] Perhaps this reflects some experience within her own life.^[9] The willingness to endorse such thoughts as adultery in the twelfth century is perhaps remarkable. “It certainly reminds us that people in the Middle Ages were aware of social injustices and did not just accept oppressive conditions as inevitable by the will of God”.^[23]

In addition to her defying the construct of love exhibited by the contemporary Church, Marie also influenced a genre that continued to be popular for another three hundred years – the medieval romance. By the time Marie was writing her lais, France already had a deep-rooted tradition of the love-lyric, specifically in Provence. Marie's Lais represent, in many ways, a transitional genre between Provençal love-lyrics from an earlier time and the romance tradition that developed these themes.^[24]

Love within the lais

Lanval

The lai of Lanval typifies the form of the lai, which relates only a (relatively) small period in the life of the hero or heroine, usually a time of crisis, unlike a true medieval romance, which is in effect a biography, spanning the hero's entire life.^[19] Lanval is a poor knight at King Arthur's court – demonstrating, incidentally, that King Arthur's world was one that Marie was willing to embrace. Relaxing in a meadow one day, reflecting upon his destitution, Lanval is approached by two maidens who lead him to their mistress, who declares her love for him. Her Otherworldly nature is revealed not only by his passage to the Isle of Avalon with her in the closing phrases of the lai, but in the magically limitless riches she showers him with, although no one can see her when she is with him and he must never reveal her existence. Queen Guinevere tries to seduce Lanval one day, but when she is rebuffed, she hurls spiteful accusations back at Lanval which cause him to mention his lady and – disaster! All gone. He is left to face trial alone once more, until his final rescue.

Marie may pose the question whether Lanval is guilty or not,^[25] but although she does not provide explicit answers, Guinevere's desires are placed in a very unfavourable light: “Good girls are the ones who have submerged their own desire in order to create socially effective simulacra of the desires of men.”^[26] The Queen is vilified because she went after the love that she desired, but it is not only she who suffers. The lai is also concerned with female power, in the form of the fairy queen who saves Lanval. However, even the fairy queen does not play a completely feminist role. The fairy queen gives Lanval the means of “satisfying not only his needs for erotic satisfaction and sustenance appropriate to a nobleman, but allowing him to fulfill his chivalric spirit in generosity of a public, indeed kingly sort, giving hospitality, patronage, and rich gifts to all”^[27]

Chevrefoil, Yonec and Laustic

In Chevrefoil, we are shown forbidden, passionate love, a love that leads ultimately to the death of the lovers. In this lai, "the choice of a Tristanian subject and the explicit statement at the beginning of the poem make the symbol of the intertwining plants one of the inevitable union of the lovers in death."^[25]

"Chevrefoil, Yonec and Laustic all deal with the subject of extra-marital love, and they all incorporate one of Marie's recurring themes, that of an unmarried lover and an unhappily married lady; and in none of the three does Marie give an indication of disapproving of this state of affairs."^[28]

Other lais

In Equitan, Bisclavret and Chevrefoil, greed is the cause of suffering. In Laustic and Chevrefoil, love ultimately fails to reach its goal. In Guigemar and Lanval, strength of love wins out in the end and a happy outcome is achieved. In Deus Amanz, Yonec, and Milun, the suffering is rewarded, though not happily. Eliduc sees the wife of the lover overcome by the sight of her rival lying on a slab and renounces her marriage, becomes a nun and Eliduc marries his sweetheart, miraculously revived; although he then becomes a monk himself and sends his new wife to becone a nun with the old. Marie de France gives no universal answers, but determines the outcome of each lai on its merits.^[19]

Influence on Literature

Marie’s stories exhibit a form of lyrical poetry that influenced the way that narrative poetry was subsequently composed, adding another dimension to the narration through her prologues and the epilogues, for example. She also developed three parts to a narrative lai: aventure (the ancient Breton deed or story); lai (Breton melodies); conte (recounting the story narrated by the lai).^[29]

In the late-fourteenth century, at broadly the same time that Geoffrey Chaucer included The Franklin's Tale, itself a Breton lai, in his Canterbury Tales,^[30] a poet named Thomas Chestre composed a Middle English romance based directly upon Marie de France's Lanval, a poem which, perhaps predictably, spanned much more now than a few weeks of the hero's life, a knight named Sir Launfal.^[31]

In 1816, the English poet Matilda Betham wrote a long poem about Marie de France in octosyllabic couplets, The Lay of Marie.

See also

• Tristan and Iseult

References

1. ^ Burgess 7.
2. ^ ^{a b} Classen, Albrecht (2003-09-15). "Marie de France". The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5494. Retrieved 2009-10-12. 
3. ^ Rossi, Carla (2007). Marie, ki en sun tens pas ne s'oblie; Maria di Francia: la Storia oltre l'enigma. Rome: Bagatto Libri. 
4. ^ Rossi, Carla (2009). Marie de France et les èrudits de Cantorbéry. Paris: Editions Classiques Garnier. 
5. ^ Holmes, Urban T. (1932). "New thoughts on Marie de France". Studies in Philology 29: 1–10. 
6. ^ Grillo, Peter R. (1988). "Was Marie de France the Daughter of Waleran II, Count of Meulan?". Medium Aevum 57: 269–273. 
7. ^ Pontfarcy, Yolande de (1995). "Si Marie de France était Marie de Meulan". Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale (Xe-XIIe Siecles) 38: 353–61. 
8. ^ Kibler, William W. and Grover A. Zinn, p 589
9. ^ ^{a b c} Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986.
10. ^ Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 11.
11. ^ ^{a b} Hazell, Dinah, 2003. Rethinking Marie. Medieval Forum Volume 2.
12. ^ Whalen, Logan E, p 63
13. ^ Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 11: "[A twelfth century poet-contemporary of Marie wrote:] Marie's poetry has caused great praise to be heaped on her and it is much appreciated by counts and barons and knights who love to have her writings read out again and again."
14. ^ Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 8.
15. ^ ^{a b} Whalen, Logan E, p 62
16. ^ Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr.
17. ^ Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr., p 100, citing Professor Schiött, author of L'Amour et les amoureux dans les Lais de Marie de France.
18. ^ Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr., p 102
19. ^ ^{a b c} Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 31.
20. ^ Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 27.
21. ^ Butterfield, Ardis, 2009, p 200.
22. ^ Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr., p 58.
23. ^ Steinberg, Theodore L. Reading the Middle Ages: an Introduction to Medieval Literature.Jefferson: McFarland, 2003. Print, p 58.
24. ^ Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 26.
25. ^ ^{a b} Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 28.
26. ^ Bloch, R. Howard. The Anonymous Marie de France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Print, p 160.
27. ^ Stein, Robert M., and Pierson Prior, Sandra. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame, 2005. Print, p 150.
28. ^ Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 29.
29. ^ Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr., pp 57–66
30. ^ Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p 36.
31. ^ Laskaya, Anne, and Salisbury, Eve (Eds), 1995. The Middle English Breton Lays. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University for TEAMS. Medieval Institute Publications.

Bibliography

• Blain, Virginia, et al. "Marie de France," The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (Yale UP, 1990, 714).
• Bloch, R. Howard. The Anonymous Marie de France. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Brown, Mary Ellen, et al. Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1998. Print.
• Burgess, Glyn Sheridan, and Keith Busby, 1986. The Lais of Marie de France. Translated into Modern English prose with an introduction. Penguin Books Limited.
• Burgess, Glyn Sheridan (1987). The Lais of Marie de France: text and context. Manchester UP. ISBN 9780719019234. http://books.google.com/books?id=ToK7AAAAIAAJ. 
• Butterfield, Ardis, 2009. England and France. In: Brown, Peter (Ed), 2009. A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350–c.1500. Wiley-Blackwell. Part IV: Encounters with Other Cultures, pp 199–214.
• Calabrese, Michael, 2007. Controlling Space and Secrets in the Lais of Marie de France. In: Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, pp 79–106. Rpt. in Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 111. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Sept. 2010.
• Gallagher, Edward J., ed. and trans. The Lays of Marie de France, Translated, with Introduction and Commentary. Hackett: Indianapolis, 2010.
• Kibler, William W. and Grover A. Zinn. Medieval France: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1995. Print.
• Kunitz, Stanley J., and Vineta Colby. European Authors 1000-1900 A Biographical Dictionary of European Literature. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company. 1967. 604–5. Print.
• McCash, June Hall, La Vie seinte Audree, A Fourth Text by Marie de France. Speculum (July 2002): 744-777.
• Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr. Marie de France. New York: Twayne, 1974. Print.
• Watt, Diane, Medieval Women's Writing: Works by and for women in England, 1100-1500. Polity, 2007. ISBN 9780745632568.
• Whalen, Logan E. (2008). Marie de France and the poetics of memory. Catholic U of America P. ISBN 9780813215099. http://books.google.com/books?id=dl7UvhlTx_8C. <

External links

• International Marie de France Society
• Le Cygne, Journal of Anglo-Norman Studies published by the International Marie de France Society
• Works by Marie de France at Project Gutenberg
• French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France at Project Gutenberg
• Complete bibliography of her works, including secondary literature (Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge, Arlima)
•  "Marie de France". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. 
• Roles of Women in the Middle Ages

Persondata
Name	France, Marie De
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth	Brittany
Date of death
Place of death