page_title: Marie de France
section_title: Life and works
hierarchical_section_title: Marie de France / Life and works
caption_attribution_description: English: Marie de France presents her book to Henry II of England. From the first edition of Marie de France's works. Русский: Мария Французская дарит свою книгу Генриху II Плантагенету. Гравюра из первого издания сочинений Марии Французской.
context_page_description: Marie de France was a poet, possibly born in what is now France, who lived in England during the late 12th century. She lived and wrote at an unknown court, but she and her work were almost certainly known at the royal court of King Henry II of England. Virtually nothing is known of her life; both her given name and its geographical specification come from her manuscripts. However, one written description of her work and popularity from her own era still exists. She is considered by scholars to be the first woman known to write francophone verse.
  Marie de France wrote in Francien, with some Anglo-Norman influence. She was proficient in Latin, as were most authors and scholars of that era, as well as Middle English and possibly Breton. She is the author of the Lais of Marie de France. She translated Aesop's Fables from Middle English into Anglo-Norman French and wrote Espurgatoire seint Partiz, Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, based upon a Latin text. Recently, she has been identified as the author of a saint's life, The Life of Saint Audrey. Her Lais were and still are widely read and influenced the subsequent development of the romance/heroic literature genre.
context_section_description: The actual name of the author now known as Marie de France is unknown; she has acquired this nom de plume from a line in one of her published works: "Marie ai num, si sui de France," which translates as "My name is Marie, and I am from France." Some of the most commonly proposed suggestions for the identity of this 12th-century poet are Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury and half-sister to Henry II, King of England; Marie, Abbess of Reading; Marie I of Boulogne; Marie, Abbess of Barking; and Marie de Meulan, wife of Hugh Talbot. Based on evidence from her writings, it is clear that, despite being born in France, she spent much of her life living in England.
  Four works, or collections of works, have been attributed to Marie de France. She is principally known for her authorship of The Lais of Marie de France, a collection of twelve narrative poems, mostly of a few hundred lines each. She claims in the preambles to most of these Breton lais that she has heard the stories they contain from Breton minstrels, and it is in the opening lines of the poem Guigemar that she first reveals her name to be Marie.
  There are 102 Ysopet fables that have also been attributed to her besides a retelling of the Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick and, recently, a saint's life called La Vie seinte Audree about Saint Audrey of Ely, although this last attribution is not accepted by all critics.
  Scholars have dated Marie's works to between about 1160 and 1215, the earliest and latest possible dates respectively. It is probable that the Lais were written in the late 12th century; they are dedicated to a "noble king", usually assumed to be Henry II of England or possibly his eldest son, Henry the Young King. Another of her works, the Fables, is dedicated to a "Count William", who may have been either William of Mandeville or William Marshall. However, it has also been suggested that Count William may refer to William Longsword. Longsword was a recognized illegitimate son of Henry II. If Marie was actually Henry II's half-sister, a dedication to his son (who would be her nephew), might be understandable.
  It is likely that Marie de France was known at the court of King Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. A contemporary of Marie, the English poet Denis Piramus, mentions in his Life of Saint Edmund the King, written in around 1180, the lais of a Marie, which were popular in aristocratic circles.
  It is clear from her writing that Marie de France was highly educated and multilingual; this level of education was not available to the common or poor at this time, so we can infer that Marie de France was of noble birth, as other noble women such as Heloise and Christine de Pizan were also educated and wrote. In addition to secular wealthy women, a number of religious women of this period also used their education and pursued writing (Hrotsvitha, Héloïse, Bridget of Sweden, and Hildegard of Bingen, to name a few).
  She was first called "Marie de France" by the French scholar Claude Fauchet in 1581, in his Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poesie françoise, and this name has been used ever since. She wrote in Francien, a dialect localized around Paris and Île-de-France, but there is presence of an Anglo-Norman dialect in her writings. Hence scholars generally deduce she lived in the parts of Île-de-France close to Normandy, or alternatively in an area in-between such as Brittany or Vexin. But Anglo-Norman influence may be due to her living in England during her adult life, which is also suggested by the fact that so many of her texts were found in England. The signification of the phrase "si sui de France", however, is ambiguous and equivocal. Marie might possibly not have stated that she was from France if she was originally from a region governed by Henry II such as Brittany, Normandy, Anjou or Aquitaine, unless she had been thoroughly anglicized.
  Three of the five surviving manuscript copies of the Lais are written in continental French, whilst British Library MS Harley 978, written in Anglo-Norman French in the mid-13th century, may reflect the di
caption: "Marie de France presents her book of poems to Henry II of England" by Charles Abraham Chasselat
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