The Author

            Nowhere in the texts of the twelve lays translated here do we find the author’s full name. Yet the lays have traditionally been ascribed in the modern era to an author who has been given the name Marie de France. The first part of that name does appear in the opening lines of Guigemar, the first lay of the collection: “Hear, my lords, what Marie says, who does not wish to be forgotten in her time.” Interestingly enough, the most complete manuscript of the lays—British Library, MS Harley 978—contains a collection of 103 beast fables as well, and in the Epilogue to these fables their author-translator writes: 

To end these tales 

I’ve here narrated 

And into Romance tongue translated, 

I’ll give my name, for memory: 

My name’s Marie, I am from France. 

(Marie ai num, si sui de France)1

Translator's note: 1 Marie de France, Fables, ed. Harriet Spiegel, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, 256–57. I have transposed the translator’s clauses in the final line in order to preserve Marie’s original order, but in so doing I have lost Spiegel’s rhyme: memory/Marie.

          It was only in 1775 that the English scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt first claimed the author of both the Fables and The Lays to be Marie de France because of the presence of the two works in the same manuscript. For Tyrwhitt, it was obvious that the Marie of The Lays was surely the same person as the Marie de France of the Fables. Once this attribution became established, scholars, always keen on finding order and connections, then decided that the same woman had translated Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, for that religious poem, a translation into French of the Latin Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii by Henry of Saltrey, contains these lines in its conclusion: 

I, Marie, have put 

The Book of Purgatory into French 

As a record, so that it might be intelligible 

And suited to lay folk.

           What’s more, just recently June Hall McCash and Judith Clark Barban published an edition of The Life of Saint Audrey with introductory xii material suggesting that this hagiographic text too was written—in this case, once again, translated from Latin into French—by Marie de France.4

           There is, of course, no certainty whatsoever that two, three, or all four of these works, now attributed to Marie de France, were written by the same woman. Linguistic similarities among the texts, as well as authorial concerns that the writer and her works not be forgotten, have contributed to the single-author theory. While Robert Baum as recently as 1968 went so far as to contend that, as far as his research had demonstrated, not even the canonical twelve lays of Harley 978 are incontrovertibly the work of a single author,5 in a recent study titled The Anonymous Marie de France, R. Howard Bloch attempts to prove, “from within” the texts attributed to her, “not only the coherence of Marie’s oeuvre,” but also that “Marie is among the most self-conscious, sophisticated, complicated, obscure, tricky, and disturbing figures of her time—the Joyce of the twelfth century.”6 “Marie de France” has become and, indeed, remains, at the very least, a convenient hook on to which three and perhaps four French literary works of the second half of the twelfth century can be hung, or she is an iconic genius and a watershed figure of the High Middle Ages. 

           In addition to the name that scholars came to use to identify the author, some have also not been shy to theorize about the possible identity of the historical figure behind the name. Since Marie is such a common Christian name and since there was no noblewoman of the highest ranks named Marie de France known to have lived in the second half of the twelfth century, a number of other Maries have been put forth as candidates: Marie de Compiègne; Marie, abbess of Shaftsbury (half sister of Henry II); Marie de Champagne (daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her first husband, Louis VII of France); Mary, abbess of Reading; Marie de Meulan; and Marie de Boulogne (daughter of Stephen of Blois, king of England from 1135 to 1154).7 The Encyclopedia Britannica makes this pointed, lapidary observation about Marie de France: “Every conjecture about her has been hotly contested.”8 

            What the line in the Fables “Marie ai num, si sui de France” (“My name’s Marie, I am from France”) does seem to suggest is that, because she names her place of origin as France or the Ile-de-France, the region around Paris, the writer had in all likelihood left the continent to live in Anglo-Norman England and that it was there that she wrote. As for when she wrote, some critics have argued for precise dates for at least three of Marie’s putative works. Hans Runte points out that by 1925 Karl Warnke, who had edited three of Marie’s texts, “had fairly well Introduction xiii established that the Lais were composed before 1167, the Fables around 1180, and the Espurgatoire [Saint Patrick’s Purgatory] after 1189. . . .” Yet in Emanuel Mickel’s 1974 book-length study of Marie de France, Mickel concluded more conservatively that “Marie probably composed her Lais after 1155 and prior to 1200.”10 Many who have studied the matter accept the idea that the “noble king” to whom The Lays are dedicated (see the Prologue) was Henry II Plantagenêt, who reigned from 1154 until his death in 1189. The second half of the twelfth century, which may strike modern readers as an exceedingly broad time frame, remains therefore the almost universally agreed upon period during which The Lays were composed.

References

APA Format:

Gallagher, E. J. (2010). Introduction. In Marie de France, The Lays of Marie de France (E. J. Gallagher, Trans., pp. ix-xxiii). Hackett Publishing Company.

ABNT Format:

GALLAGHER, Edward J. Introduction. In: MARIE DE FRANCE. The Lays of Marie de France. Translation: Edward J. Gallagher. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010. p. ix-xxiii.