R.
Howard Bloch.
The Anonymous Marie de France.
Chicago University
Press, 2003.
384pp.
Hardback ISBN
0226059685.
Publisher's
recommended price $45.00
This
book
by one
of our most admired and influential medievalists offers a fundamental
reconception
of the person generally assumed to be the first woman writer in French,
the author known as Marie de France. The Anonymous Marie de France
is the first work to consider all of the writing ascribed to Marie,
including
her famous Lais, her 103 animal fables, and the earliest
vernacular Saint
Patrick's Purgatory.
Evidence
about
Marie de France's life is so meager that we know next to nothing about
her - not where she was born and to what rank, who her parents were,
whether
she was married or single, where she lived and might have traveled,
whether
she dwelled in cloister or at court, nor whether in England or France.
In the face of this great writer's near anonymity, scholars have
assumed
her to be a simple, naive, and modest Christian figure. Bloch's claim,
in contrast, is that Marie is among the most self-conscious,
sophisticated,
complicated, and disturbing figures of her time - the Joyce of the
twelfth
century. At a moment of great historical turning, the so-called
Renaissance
of the twelfth century, Marie was both a disrupter of prevailing
cultural
values and a founder of new ones. Her works, Bloch argues, reveal an
author
obsessed by writing, by memory, and by translation, and acutely aware
not
only of her role in the preservation of cultural memory, but of the
transforming
psychological, social, and political effects of writing within an oral
tradition.
Marie's
intervention
lies in her obsession with the performative capacities of literature
and
in her acute awareness of the role of the subject in interpreting his
or
her own world. According to Bloch, Marie develops a theology of
language
in the Lais, which emphasize the impossibility of living in the flesh
along
with a social vision of feudalism in decline. She elaborates an ethics
of language in the Fables, which, within the context of the court of
Henry
II, frame and form the urban values and legal institutions of the
Anglo-Norman
world. And in her Espurgatoire, she produces a startling examination of
the afterlife which Bloch links to the English conquest and occupation
of medieval Ireland.
With
a
penetrating
glimpse into works such as these, The Anonymous Marie de France
recovers the central achievements of one of the most pivotal figures in
French literature. It is a study that will be of enormous value to
medievalists,
literary scholars, historians of France, and anyone interested in the
advent
of female authorship.
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