Marie de France: A 12th-Century Literary Miracle

Truly, as Marie de France says in her lai, Equitan:

Whoever indulges in love without sense or moderation
recklessly endangers his life;
such is the nature of love
that no one involved with it can keep his head.

And yet, as she remarks in another lai, Guigemar,

Whoever deals with good material
feels pain if it's treated improperly.
Listen, my lords, to the words of Marie,
who does not forget her responsibilities when her turn comes.

Here, on this grey Friday morning, I am thinking about this mysterious twelfth-century writer--how shrewdly, even matter-of-factly, she comprehends the two propulsions of the poet: the reckless abandonment to emotional experience; the cool-headed manipulation of her material.

As I write in A Poet's Sourcebook, "Marie de France’s Lais, a set of twelve verse narratives based on Breton legends, are key texts in the literature of chivalry and courtly love and were among the first writings to mention King Arthur and his court. They have influenced poets from Spenser to Keats, and their coupling of the Celtic supernatural with the formalized code of chivalry has been a primary influence on the conventions of European fairy-tale literature." But no one knows exactly who she was, other than the fact that she was born in France and, according to translators Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante, "wrote either at or for the English court, which as a result of the Norman Conquest, was French-speaking in her day."

In an afterword to his own translation of her lai Eliduc, novelist John Fowles noted that Marie may have gone to England as a member of the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. "The king to whom she dedicates her Lais . . . may have been Eleanor's husband, Henry II; . . . and there is even a plausible possibility that Marie was Henry's illegitimate sister." In any case, "it is very difficult to imagine the Lais being written by other than a finely educated (therefore, in that age, finely born) young woman."

A fluent scholar of French, Fowles was deeply interested in the stories and legends that lie beneath so much French and English literature. But what also attracted him to Marie's work was the way in which she "grafted her own knowledge of the world on new material. Effectively she introduced a totally new element into European literature. It was composed not least of sexual honesty and a very feminine awareness of how people really behaved--and how behavior and moral problems can be expressed through things like dialogue and action. She did for her posterity something of what Jane Austen did for hers--that is, she set a new standard for accuracy over human emotions and their absurdities."

Though I'm always irritated by Fowles's tendency to use patriarchal shorthand--"a very feminine awareness," forsooth--I think he is incisive about Marie's remarkable ability to create new and complex characters and situations within the framework of what were, to her first audiences, already familiar narrative patterns. In Chaitivel, for instance, she tells the tale of a lady who is courted by four knights. After three are killed in a tournament and the fourth is gravely wounded, the lady "mourned for each by name."

"Alas," she said, "what shall I do?
I'll never be happy again.
I loved these four knights
and desired each one for himself;
there was great good in all of them;
they loved me more than anything.
For their beauty, their bravery,
their merit, their generosity,
I made them fix their love on me;
I didn't want to lose them all by taking one.
I don't know which I should grieve for most;
but I cannot conceal or disguise my grief."

When I read a passage such as this one, I almost feel as if Marie has reconfigured the notion of chivalry. Rather than the ideal of a singular devotion--one knight devoted to one lady--the notion takes on a new coloring: that of an individual's responsibility to the bearers of the chivalric ideal. The lady in Chaitivel shoulders the weight of loving all of those men who have graciously loved her. Is the poet hinting that a woman's sexual freedom can be not only an honorable choice but also a deeply moral one? If so, this is a breathtaking moment in the history of human conversation.