The French poet Marie de France (active late 12th century) was an accomplished writer of lais and was probably the originator of that form. Marie de France is one of those authors whose work is well known but whose life is largely conjectural. Her...

A poet, storyteller, and translator who clearly establishes her ambitions and credentials on the side of the moderns, Marie de France is one of the finest writers of the twelfth-century Renaissance and the first woman poet whose name has come down...

The Anonymous Marie de France. By R. Howard Bloch. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 367. Karl Warnke began his groundbreaking 1925 critical edition of Marie de France's Lais with a brief, one-sentence paragraph: "Marie de France is...

Marie de France; Lais, ed. (and trans.) Philippe Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). 484 pp. ISBN 2-07-040543-5. F. Fr. 40.00. This edition, published in the Folio Classique series, is clearly aimed at the student or general reader. The introduction covers such topics as...

In the following essay, Bowers defines the medieval method of judgment by ordeal and asserts that Marie's Lais critiques the era's shift from trial by ordeal to "more efficient" ways of violating people's privacy and personal freedom.

In the following essay, Sturges contends that readers of Marie's Lais are obliged by the structure of the Lais themselves to interpret the words and to become immersed in the stories as attempts at meaning, not as depictions of reality.

In the following essay, Burgess observes that most of the characters in Marie's Lais belong to the upper classes, and thus issues of loyalty, service, and expertise in battle and hunting predominate.

Responds to two scholarly articles about the lais of Marie de France. The essay explains portions of Marie's works and seeks to prove that, by creating an unfortunate outcome for all characters who commit adultery, despite their adherence to the code or lack thereof, Marie de France shows her support for strong marital faithfulness rather than revealing her feminist or anti-feminist voice.