Marie de France wrote during an auspicious period in the history of French literature. Few literary texts in the vernacular appear before 1150; in the second half of the century works in French are abundant. Between the Serments de Strasbourg in 842 and the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Louis VII in 1137, one counts fewer than half a dozen major works in the langue d’oïl.¹ By 1152, when Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, future king of England, a full-scale literary revival had been kindled, and the list of major literary works in the vernacular more than tripled before the...

Twelfth-century France witnessed an unprecedented production of literary texts written in the French vernacular. Like other major authors who wrote in French during this linguistically transitional epoch, such as Wace, Benoît de sainte-Maure, and Chrétien de troyes, the Anglo-Norman poet Marie de France developed a technique of literary composition steeped in the tradition of classical rhetoric. Douglas Kelly has pointed out that the classical influence on medieval poets came through their training in the arts of poetry and prose: “The medieval arts of poetry and prose draw on learned and scholastic traditions of ancient, and especially Roman, origin. These traditions...

To avoid possible confusion, the fifty-six-line prologue that precedes Marie de France’s Lais in the Harley 978 manuscript of the British Library is often referred to in contemporary critical discourse as the “General Prologue,” which distinguishes it from the exordia of individual lais, especially the prologue of Guigemar that immediately follows it in this same manuscript.¹ of the five extant manuscripts that preserve at least one or more of the lais, Harley 978 is unique in that it is the only manuscript to record the General Prologue, and is also the only manuscript that assembles all twelve lais (“assembler,” as...

As noted in chapter 2, Harley 978 in the British Library, London, is the only manuscript containing all twelve of Marie de France’s lais.¹ Guigemar’s position as the first lai in the collection, preceded only by the General Prologue, strategically emphasizes the significance of Marie’s descriptive style and architecture of memory.² The earlier discussion of the prologues and epilogues demonstrated how the General Prologue functions as a type of poetic manifesto in which Marie evokes the process of literary inventio and focuses on the act of remembering. Guigemar, in turn, is the most descriptive of all her lais, and also...

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a pronounced increase in the number of manuscripts containing Isopets, or collections of Aesopic fables from the Greek Phaedrean tradition that were accessible to medieval French authors through Latin adaptations, like those of Romulus.¹ The Isopets were composed in Old French, especially in octosyllabic rhymed couplets, though sometimes later in prose as well. The abundance of manuscripts bears witness to the success that these brief stories enjoyed during this period, as they used animals, insects, humans, plants, the elements, and inanimate objects to critique contemporary society and culture and to convey moral lessons to...

Marie de France’s Lais and Fables reveal a poetics of memory through vocabulary that implicitly or explicitly evokes this aspect of literary topical invention, and through a plan of detailed descriptions that render objects and events visible to the imagination, helping the audience later to recall the narrative sequence. Both of these texts demonstrate her creative art of finding preexisting material, committing it to memory, embellishing it with descriptive detail, and arranging it in an order that generates a new conception of the work.

Like the two narrative texts before them, the Espurgatoire seint Patriz and La vie seinte Audree...

Marie de France’s use of descriptio and her concern with memory reveal a proficient training in the medieval arts of poetry and prose. Descriptio and memoria, two essential elements of topical invention, entered medieval instruction in literary composition through the study of authorities on rhetoric and grammar from antiquity, such as Cicero, the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Priscian. the art of inventio that developed in the Middle Ages honed the ability to find preexisting materia, commit that material to memory, and later arrange the disparate parts into a new whole that displayed the author’s ingenium.

Marie de...