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New York Public Library Digital Collection
The Anonymous Marie de France by
The Anonymous Marie de France offers a fundamental reconception of the person generally assumed to be the first woman writer in French, the woman now referred to as Marie de France. Written by renowned medievalist R. Howard Bloch, it is the first book to consider all of the writing ascribed to Marie, including her famous Lais, her 103 animal fables, and the earliest vernacular Saint Patrick’s Purgatory. Marie is, Bloch asserts, one of the most self-conscious, sophisticated, and disturbing figures of her time—a writer whose works reveal an acute awareness not only of her role in the preservation of cultural memory, but also of the transformative psychological, social, and political effects of her writing within an oral tradition. The Anonymous Marie de France recovers the central achievements of one of the most pivotal figures in French literature. It is a study that will be of enormous value to medievalists, literary scholars, historians of France, and anyone interested in the advent of female authorship.
A Companion to Marie de France by
Presenting traditional views alongside new critical approaches, the chapters in this book present fresh perspectives on the poetics of the 12th-century author, Marie de France, the first woman of letters to write in French.
The Lais of Marie de France by
This collection of love stories involving princes and princesses was written in the twelfth century by an unknown Frenchwoman.
The Lays of Marie de France by
The twelve "lays" of Marie de France, the earliest known French woman poet, are here presented in sprightly English verse by poet and translator David R. Slavitt. Traditional Breton folktales were the raw material for Marie de France's series of lively but profound considerations of love, life, death, fidelity and betrayal, and luck and fate. They offer acute observations about the choices that women make, startling in the late twelfth century and challenging even today. Combining a woman's wisdom with an impressive technical bravura, the lays are a minor treasure of European culture.
Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory by
Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory presents the first exhaustive treatment of the rhetorical use of description and memory in all the narrative works of the late 12th-century poet, Marie de France--the first woman to compose literary texts in French.
Tales the Textiles Tell in the Lais of Marie de France: Weaving as a Signifying System by
This work is unique in showing that textiles constitute a cohesive secondary signifying system throughout the Lais of Marie de France. There they function as texts-within-a-text. Etymologically, both text and textile derive from weaving. We read these textiles as complete signs that transfer meaning, as symbols whose meaning may or may not be interpreted, or merely as signals highlighting import. The quantity of textile references in Marie's minimalistic texts emphasizes their potential for meaning. In view of the fact that women were the primary producers of textiles until the late Middle Ages, textiles should be read as a form of feminine text, especially since we presume theLais' author to be a woman.
