Marie de France

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Frontispiece of the first printed edition from 1820: Marie de France presents her work to Henry II of England

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

Book title of the 1911 English edition in Everyman's Library

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:

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

Web links

Commons : Marie de France  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Marie de France  - Quotes

Remarks

  1. ↑ 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.
  2. ↑ 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.
  3. ↑ 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