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This introductory chapter discusses the contents of this volume which is about the works and identity of Marie de France who is considered France's first woman poet. It suggests that the anonymity of Marie de France is not simply a matter of lack of attention to detail because the concept of authorship already existed at a high level of sophistication in the twelfth century. This chapter argues that the case of Marie de France is no different from any other case of authorial attribution where there is no sufficient documentation to reach a closure.

This chapter considers the incorporation of the courtly love ideal into the verse narratives of some Arthurian romances. It also examines the question of how widely the principles of courtly love were actually put into practice in the twelfth century. The discussions cover the source material of Arthurian romance; a reading of Chrétien's “Lancelot”; aristocratic speech in the Tristan myth; the Lais of Marie de France; more real-life romances of the late twelfth century; and courtly love conventions' satirical treatment in fabliaux.

This chapter analyzes the key issues explored in Marie de France's Espurgatoire Seint Patriz. It suggests that this work resolved most of the unresolved issues in Lais and Fables and it the most theoretically sophisticated work of a self-consciously theoretical oeuvre. It also states that this work is considered to be one of the best sellers of the Middle Ages. This chapter also shows that Espurgatoire Seint Patriz is the first literary rendering to William Shakespeare's mention of Hamlet's father's ghost.

This chapter examines the drama of language in Marie de France's Lais and Guigemar. It suggests that this drama involves a deep desire on Marie's part for control over meaning and over intention in her works. This chapter also discusses Marie's language theater which only uses language as a poetic vehicle but makes of it an object of plotted scrutiny.

This chapter discusses the moral lessons and the depiction of social mobility in Marie de France's Fables. It suggests that in the Fables Marie was obsessed with the question of perspective and of interpretation as the determining element of value, and of value as a determinant of action. This chapter also argues that the truth of the Fables lies not in the dispensation of truth, but in the exposition of an opposition between truth and lies that can be translated into appropriate and inappropriate action.

This chapter analyzes the meaning of the word aventure in Marie de France's Lai. It suggests that aventure is one of the richly plurivalent signifiers of the Lais and constitutes a liminal key to the whole. This word designates that which exists before and beyond the text in the fantasy of an unrecounted, unremembered, chaotic realm of unarticulated consciousness. This is the reason why many of the stories in the Lais literally framed by the word aventure.

This chapter examines the meaning of Marie de France's Fables in relation to the rise of the monarchic state. It suggests that the Fables represents the institutionalization of the violence of the feudal world within the new civil space of city and court where the predatory instinct takes the form of envy. This chapter also argues that the conflict between logic and the body and Marie's thoughts about the absolutism of appetite are depicted in the presence and role of the animal appetites in human relations.

This chapter analyzes the tone or voice in Marie de France's Lais. It argues that the fatality attached to language in the Lais seems to function in a number of tales according to the so-called law of fated exposure. This chapter explains how revelation language works as an agent of despoiling disclosure in the Lais and suggests that the overt speech act can be seen to be less the primary source of the morbidity connected to language in the Lais than its culmination.

This chapter seeks to explore how dying for love is gendered in medieval French and Occitan texts, focusing on how women die differently from men. This chapter includes interpretations of some of the most iconic moments of dying for love in medieval literature: the Demoisele d'Eschalot from La Mort le roi Artu and Jaufre Rudel dying in the arms of the Countess of Tripoli in his vida.

This chapter examines language use in Marie de France's Fables. It suggests that the basic material of the fable gains the resonance of a didactic tale alongside the dit, beau dit, mots, beaux mots, or aventure which also carries the meaning “story.” It also mentions that the work fable is synonymous with a lie, with ruse, or with fiction. This chapter analyzes the extent to which the Lais and Fables should be read together and to what degree do they offer internal evidence of a single poetic persona.

This chapter explores literary debates about the contractual nature of sovereign relations in a set of literary texts about wolves: saints’ lives in which wolves submit miraculously to human mastery; Marie de France’s fables, in which wolves contemplate the advantages of domestication; and Marie's Bisclavret, a story about a werewolf. In all these narratives, a wild wolf’s consideration of voluntary domestication structures a representation of consensual subjection to mastery and rule between animals and human masters. Yet in representations of animals as subjects that consider or desire a relationship with humans, medieval literary texts also explore the limits of a social contract that would define human mastery as a response to animal desire.

This chapter examines the elements of doctrine that fit into the mold of fable and of romance in Marie de France's Espurgatoire Seint Patriz, her translation of the Tractatus. It analyzes Marie's reasons for choosing to write a literary translation of Tractatus and describes how Espurgatoire Seint Patriz served as a dissemination of the legend in the vernacular. This chapter also argues that what the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz accomplished in converting a supposedly documentary treatise on the origins and workings of Purgatory into a tale of knightly deeds is significant because it is a translation not just between languages but between different cultural discourses.

This chapter analyzes the depiction of Saint Patrick, afterlife, and Purgatory in Marie de France's Espurgatoire Seint Patriz. The analysis suggests that the visions of the afterlife in which purgatory takes the shape in Espurgatoire Seint Patriz have nothing to do with Saint Patrick. This chapter also explains that though Saint Patrick may have traveled throughout Ireland raising the dead, the dead whom he raised did not visit Purgatory; nor is Purgatory synonymous with an underground cavern.

The most interesting uses of magic and the supernatural in romance are those where potential wonder at the magic is displaced by wonder at the virtue of the hero (as in some lais of Marie de France); or, alternatively, where magic fails to work, in parallel to the hero’s failure to be outstanding (as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). This subversion of the supernatural by human agency is too counter-intuitive to become an inherited element in story transmission, and it is reinvented by a series of major romances. It resists adaptation into allegory — in the Faerie Queene, the magic is more plot-oriented, and it works; but Shakespeare exploits it in a number of plays, including Othello. The strong association of magic with the forbidden adds an element of tension to all these usages.

This chapter examines the trauma produced when a character’s social identity does not match their bodily identity: a situation arising not only with the erratic behaviour of knights gone mad, but also in tales of cross-dressing, lycanthropy, and somnambulism. What these forms of ‘deviance’ have in common is a failure of the performance by which the self is fashioned and staged. Yde et Olive offers the example of a princess whose male disguise proves all too successful. Ysaïe le Triste and the prose Tristan portray madness as a disconnection between conscious role-playing and a bodily ‘memory’ of learnt actions. Marie de France’s Bisclavret explores the ways in which a knight does or does not retain his human identity when his body transforms into that of a wolf. The problem of somnambulism, and its destructive effects on knightly identity, is explored by Jean Froissart in both his Chroniques and his romance Meliador.

This chapter examines the influence of the Psalms on the development of vernacular authorial roles in the twelfth century. It argues that authors of courtly romances, in the period of the genre’s emergence, drew upon the Psalms and the figure of David to sanction a new authorial office. In particular, it argues that Marie de France, in both the General Prologue and the lais themselves, looks to the Psalms for notions of lament, remembrance, obscurity, and restoration that frame both her authorial persona and the purposes of her genre. In ‘Yonec’ in particular, we see a heroine’s lament that is carefully modelled on the lament Psalms but also reproduces the duties of authorship and genre that Marie claims for herself in the Prologue. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the Psalms, working through ‘neighbouring’ or ‘contrafactive’ rather than familial relationships, definitely shaped romance as a genre.

This chapter considers the interplay between medieval Tristan romances and Tristan songs, music closely associated with the romances and indeed attributed to the character Tristan himself. In particular, the chapter looks at Marie de France’s lai ‘Chevrefoil’, and the anonymous thirteenth-century lai ‘Kievrefuel’, which is quite distinct from Marie’s narrative poem but evokes it in some particulars. The multiple relationships between different Tristan poems and Tristan tunes, intertwined and mutually evoking each other, allows us to ‘think [of] Romance’ as a larger, modular experience, a cultural game that can transcend an individual text and generate potentially limitless further texts. It also suggests a twelfth-century way of ‘thinking [with] Romance’ in a playful, creative way that both erases and accentuates the fictionality of the romance world and its characters.

This chapter considers the literary representation of love in both religious and secular texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It discusses the ‘sexuality’ of religious devotion, and the emergence of the love-plot in the romance as a figure for both social and economic success. It considers the differing representations of love inherited from classical authors, and developed by contemporaries into different narrative patterns. It discusses the role of privacy as a concept that enables a reorganization of social mores. Thomas of Britain’s Tristan receives extended analysis, alongside a comparison with Richard of Saint-Victor’s Four Degrees of Violent Love.