Marie De France

Marie De France (fl. c. 1175-1190), French poet and fabulist. In the introduction (c. 1240) to his Vie Seint Edmund le Rey1 Denis Pyramus says she was one of the most popular of authors with counts, barons and knights, but especially with ladies. She is also mentioned by the anonymous author of the Couronnement Renart. Her lays were translated into Norwegian2 by order of Haakon IV.; and Thomas Chestre, who is generally supposed to have lived in the reign of Henry VI., gave a version of Lanval.3 Very little is known about her history, and until comparatively recently the very century in which she lived remained a matter of dispute. In spite of her own statement in the epilogue to her fables: “Marie ai num, si suis de France,” generally interpreted to mean that Marie was a native of the Île de France, she seems to have been of Norman origin, and certainly spent most of her life in England. Her language, however, shows little trace of Anglo-Norman provincialism. Like Wace, she used a literary dialect which probably differed very widely from common Norman speech. The manuscripts in which Marie’s poems are preserved date from the late 13th or even the 14th century, but the language fixes the date of the poems in the second half of the 12th century. The Lais are dedicated to an unknown king, who is identified as Henry II. of England; and the fables, her Ysopet, were written according to the Epilogus for a Count William, generally recognized to be William Longsword, earl of Salisbury. The author of Couronnement Renart, says that Marie had dedicated her poem to the count William to whom the unknown poet addresses himself. This is William of Dampierre (d. 1251), the husband of the countess Margaret of Flanders, and his identification with Marie’s count William is almost certainly an error. Marie lived and wrote at the court of Henry II., which was very literary and purely French. Queen Eleanor was a Provençal, and belonged to a family in which the patronage of poetry was a tradition. There is no evidence to show whether Marie was of noble origin or simply pursued the profession of a trouvère for her living.

The origin of the lais has been the subject of much discussion. Marie herself says that she had heard them sung by Breton minstrels. It seems probable that it is the lesser or French Brittany from which the stories were derived, though something may be due to Welsh and Cornish sources. Gaston Paris (Romania, vol. xv.) maintained that Marie had heard the stories from English minstrels, who had assimilated the Celtic legends. In any case the Breton lays offer abundant evidence of traditions from Scandinavian and Oriental sources. The Guigemar of Marie de France presents marked analogies with the ordinary Oriental romance of escape from a harem, for instance, with details superadded from classical mythology. Marie seems to have contented herself with giving new literary form to the stories she heard by turning them into Norman octosyllabic verse, and apparently made few radical changes from her originals. Joseph Bédier thinks that the lays of the Breton minstrels were prose recitals interspersed with short lyrics something after the manner of the cante-fable of Aucassin et Nicolette. Marie’s task was to give these cante-fables a narrative form destined to be read rather than sung or recited.