Marie De France in the Later Middle Ages

The Afterlife of a Twelfth-Century Poet: Marie de France in the Later Middle Ages Sylvia Huot ignificant evidence exists for the favorable reception and literary impact of the mid-twelfth-century lais attributed to Marie de SFrance. The reworkings of Eliduc in the late twelfth-century Ille et Galeron and of Fresne in the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Galeran de Bretagne, for example, show that these texts caught the interest of poets working in the tradition of the early “roman réaliste.”1 The reference to Lanval in Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose, and the various thirteenth-century allusions to a Lai du Chevrefeuille com- posed by Tristan, though brief, imply in their very casualness that audiences were expected to know these texts.2 These examples all reflect an ongoing interest in the so-called Breton lai and, in particular, in those now attributed to Marie. The celebrated allusion to “Dame Marie” and her lais in Denis Piramus’s Vie de Seint Edmund li rei, dating from the end of the twelfth century, also testifies both to the popularity of the lais and, at least in the first few decades following their composition, to their association with an author named “Marie.” 1 See Frederick A. G. Cowper, “The Sources of Ille et Galeran,” Modern Philology 20 (1922-23): 35-44; Joan Brumlik, “Thoughts on Renaut’s Use of Marie’s Fresne in Galeran de Bretagne,” Florilegium 14 (1995-96): 87-98; Roger Dragonetti, Le Mirage des sources: L’art du faux dans le roman médiéval (Paris: Seuil, 1987): 229-60; Paul Vincent Rockwell, “Twin Mysteries: Ceci n’est pas un Fresne: Rewriting Resem- blance in Galeran de Bretagne,” in Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. Keith Busby and Norris J. Lacy (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994) 487-504. 2 In Renart’s Rose, Conrad’s bliss on his wedding night is said to exceed that of Tristan or Lanval; see Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix Lecoy (Paris: Champion, 1970), vv. 5507-15. In the Perceval continuation, the incognito Tristan plays the lai as a means of signaling his identity to Iseult; see Gerbert de Montreuil, La Continuation de Perceval, ed. Mary Williams, vol. 1 (Paris: Champion, 1922), vv. 4066-95. On this and other allusions to Tristan’s lai, including a thirteenth-century lyric lai attributed in one manuscript to Tristan, see Jean Maillard, “Le ‘Lai’ et la ‘note’ du chevrefeuille,” Musica Disciplina 13 (1959): 3-13. 192 Sylvia Huot Somewhat further afield, the late-thirteenth-century Old Norse com- pilation known as the Strengleikar testifies to an interest in Old French narrative lais at the court of Hákon Hákonarson.3 Included in this collection are translations of eleven of Marie’s lais (all but Eliduc; Lanval and Chaitivel are fragmentary due to missing folios), together with translations of ten other anonymous lais. The Middle English Lai le Freine and Sir Landevale, in turn, show that there was an audience for at least two of Marie’s lais in fourteenth-century England.4 More intriguing still, Colin Wilcockson has argued that a pair of similes in Book III of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde—the first comparing the intertwined lovers to a honeysuckle vine encircling a tree, the second comparing Criseyde to a nightingale—should be read, together with an earlier reference to the nightingale in Book II, as a conjoined citation of Marie’s Chievrefoil and Laüstic.5 This not only means that Marie’s poetry was known to medieval England’s greatest poet, but also implies that the lais were still thought of as interrelated parts of a whole, their central images combining meaningfully to reinforce, in Wilcockson’s words, “a Leitmotiv […] of clandestine love that ends in tragedy” (323). It is this associative reading of lais in tandem that interests me here. To what extent were the twelve lais that we identify with Marie de France—or indeed any subset thereof—perceived by later medieval readers as a unified corpus? Only one manuscript—British Library, Harley 978, copied in the thirteenth century—transmits these twelve lais, with the general Prologue, as a self-contained whole. Even it gives no indication of authorship aside from the authorial exhortation—“Oëz, seigneurs, ke dit Marie” (Guigemar, v. 3)—that is treated as part of Guigemar in modern editions, but as part of the Prologue in the Harley manuscript.6 Another thirteenth-century manu- 3 Strengleikar: An Old Norse Translation of Twenty-One Old French Lais, ed. and trans. Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane (Oslo: Norsk Historisk Kjeldeskrift Institutt, 1979). 4 See The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995). 5 Colin Wilcockson, “The Woodbind and the Nightingale in Troilus and Criseyde Book II, Lines 918-24 and Book III, Lines 1230-1239,” Notes and Queries 247 (2002): 320-23. 6 See Jean Rychner, ed., Les Lais de Marie de France (Paris: Champion, 1973) 194, 238-39. All citations of the Lais are to this edition. Of the three other manuscripts that transmit Guigemar, only one, BnF, fr. 2168, contains these opening lines. .

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