Marie de France - Life and Works

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." 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 I of Boulogne; Marie, Abbess of Barking; and Marie de Meulan, wife of Hugh Talbot.

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.

It is likely that Marie de France was known at the court of King Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. 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.

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. 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. 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.