Marie de France
Marie de France (* around 1135 in the Île-de-France region , † around 1200 probably in England) was a French-speaking poet.
Life
Marie is the first known author in French literature, but there is no information about her person other than her own statement “Marie ai nun, si suis de France” (my name is Maria and I am from France), according to which she was born in the Parisian area would have to. Judging by her profound education, she certainly came from the highest circles. It is possible that she is identical with an illegitimate daughter of Gottfried V of Anjou , ie a half-sister of the English King Henry II , who is attested as the abbess of Shaftesbury .
Marie de France wrote her works in Anglo- Norman , because her target audience was the English court, in the vicinity of which she apparently lived. At the English royal courts , Old French Norman was spoken in its Anglo- Norman variant from William the Conqueror until the end of the Hundred Years War .
Works
Marie's best-known and most original work is the Lais , a collection of twelve verse novellas, each comprising between approx. 100 and approx. 1000 rhyming eight-syllables in pairs and evidently originating from around 1170 over a long period of time. They mainly process fairy tale motifs, e.g. B. fairy and metamorphosis stories, as well as legends. The latter are mostly of "British", that is, Celtic origin, including the Tristan and Isolde fabric, which is tangible here for the first time, even if only in one of its numerous episodes.
The themes of the simply but delicately told and still appealing novels are very different, but above all it is about the difficulties of lovers to get together and / or to stay together. In the majority of Lais, these difficulties arise not least from the fact that the beloved woman is married.
Marie also left a collection of 102 fables, the Esope or Ysopet (1170–80). As she says at the end, she used an old English model by "King Alfred", who in turn followed a Latin translation of the Greek collection of fables Aesops (6th century BC?) (But obviously also uses other sources Has).
Her last work is L'Espurgatoire seint Patriz , written around 1190, a translation into French verses of the Latin prose text Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii .
Time criticism
Some of Marie de France's love poems (tales of verse, lais ) denounce the misogyny of her time, which was the epoch of the " minstrels " in whose poetry she took part. She "expresses [in it] the sexual oppression of the aristocratic woman with unusual frankness."
The Lais
Specifically, there are the following twelve texts that deal with the love of women, whose social position is changing during this time:
- Guigemar or Guingamor
- Equitan
- Le Fresne ('The Ash ')
- Bisclavret : The story of a werewolf who cannot turn back into a human because his wife hid his clothes to get rid of him. In the end, however, the cheated person can free himself from his predicament. The novella shows that the characters of medieval poetry are by no means one-dimensional; because the ostensibly bad werewolf turns out to be the really good one in the end.
- Lanval
- Les deus amanz ('The two lovers')
- Yonec
- Laüstic
- Milun
- Chaitivel
- Chevrefoil ( honeysuckle -Lai)
- Eliduc
literature
expenditure
- Marie de France: Poetic stories based on old Breton love sagas . Translated by Wilhelm Hertz, ed. and afterword by Günther Schweikle. Phaidon, Essen 1986 ISBN 3888511151 (contains ten texts as translations, two as table of contents in the appendix).
- Marie de France: Aesop. Single , annotated and translated by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht , Munich 1973.
- Marie de France: The Lais . Translated, with an introduction, a bibliography and notes by Dietmar Rieger. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 1980 (bilingual edition).
- The Lais of Marie de France . Penguin, London 1986, ISBN 0-14-044476-9 (translated by Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby).
- Saint Patrick's Purgatory. A Poem (Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies; Vol. 94). MRTS Publisher, Binghamton, NY 1993, ISBN 0-86698-108-X (translated by Michael Curley).
- Jean Rychner (ed.): Les Lais de Marie de France ( Les classiques français du moyen âges , vol. 93). Honoré Champion, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-85203-028-4 .
Secondary literature
- Herman Brät, Marie de France et l'obscurité des anciens . In: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen , Vol. 79 (1978), pp. 180-184, ISSN 0028-3754 .
- Ebba Kristine Brightenback: Remarks on the 'Prologue' to Marie de France's Lais . In: Romance Philology , 30 : 168-177 (1976), ISSN 0035-8002 .
- Glyn S. Burgess: The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Context . University of Georgia Press, Athens 1987, ISBN 0-8203-0948-6 .
- JC Delcos: Encore sur le prologue des Lais de Marie de France . In: Le Moyen Âge / 4. Serie , Vol. 90 (1984), pp. 223-232, ISSN 0027-2841 .
- Bruno W. Häuptli: Marie de France. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 22, Bautz, Nordhausen 2003, ISBN 3-88309-133-2 , Sp. 805-808.
- Ernest Hoepffner: The Breton Lais . In: Roger S. Loomis (Ed.): Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. A collaborative history . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1979, ISBN 0-19-811588-1 (reprint of the Oxford 1959 edition).
- June Hall McCash: La Vie was Audree. A Fourth Text by Marie de France? , in: Speculum 77 (2002) 744-777, ISSN 0038-7134 .
Web links
- The Lais of Marie de France in Old French online at fr.wikisource.org
- Literature by and about Marie de France in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by Marie de France in the Gutenberg-DE project
- http://www.mariedefrance.org/
- Article in Gert Pinkernell, Names, Titles and Dates of French Literature 1 (main source of the article's biographical sections)
Remarks
- ↑ Henriette Walter : Honni soit qui mal y pense: L'incroyable histoire d'amour entre le français et l'anglais. Robert Laffont, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-253-15444-X , p. 105.
- ↑ Due to a dating error in the Tractatus , the work was temporarily not ascribed to her. However, as Yolande de Pontfarcy points out in her critical edition of L'Espurgatoire , there is no doubt that the lais , the fables, and this poetry are by the same author. See Yolande de Pontfarcy: L'Espurgatoire seint Patriz . Peeters, Löwen 1995, ISBN 2-87723-176-3 , p. 38.
- ↑ Ursula Liebertz-Grün: Courtly authors. From the Carolingian cultural reform to humanism. Marie de France. In: Gisela Brinker-Gabler (ed.): German literature by women . Vol. I, ISBN 3 406 32814 8 , pp. 44-47, here p. 45.
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Marie de France |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | medieval writer of verse novels and fables |
DATE OF BIRTH | around 1135 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Île-de-France |
DATE OF DEATH | around 1200 |