Tales of Courtly Love: Marie de France's Lais
Marie de France could rightly be argued to be a pioneering champion of medieval intellectual property rights.
The twelfth-century author of the Lais, ennobling poems of courtly passion, went to greater lengths than most of her coevals to make herself known to posterity. In all three of her surviving poetic works – St Patrick’s Purgatory, the Fables, and the Lais themselves – she inscribes her name, thereby making her authorship indisputable. Her hunger for recognition is most apparent in her Fables, in which she cautions any potential intellectual thief against claiming the fruits of her work for himself:
I shall name myself so that I shall be remembered
Marie is my name, and I am of France.
It may be that many clerks
Will take my labours on themselves.
I don’t want any of them to claim it.
And so it could, at first, appear befuddling that we know nothing about her life – nothing, in fact, except for the biographical information shared in the very postscript above: that her name was Marie, that she was from France, and that she was an poet of considerable authorial pride.
And yet the irony is not as extreme as one might assume. In her relative obscurity, Marie de France was far from a historical anomaly. The twelfth century was an era of relative authorial anonymity. The author’s role was, then, the same as it had been since the rise of Christianity 700 years earlier: as a humble vessel for the transmission of divine artistic material. The medieval poetess, much as the medieval composer or painter, was a messenger rather than a creator. She stood in absolute humility in relation to the creative process, which flowed, not from her but from god and originated firmly in the latter.
The metaphysical reality in which Marie lived and worked was a firmly theistic one. God stood at the centre of the universe and man drifted, rather modestly, at its periphery. The individual artist / hero, a concept which would see its apotheosis in nineteenth-century Romanticism, wouldn’t begin to take root for another three hundred years and was about as far a notion from the Medieval artist’s mind as the non-existence of God or the precedence of reason over revealed truth.
It is against this metaphysical backdrop that Marie de France, and Medieval creative artistry in general should be understood. Authorship, in the Middle Ages, was an irrelevant notion because the ego of human being behind it was irrelevant.
It is no wonder, then, that many of the era’s literary masterpieces are anonymous to one degree or another – and one needn’t even go as far back as Beowulf (ca. 1000) to see this. In Marie de France’s own time, we have the Middle High German Niebelungenlied, the Old French Chanson de Roland (ca. 1115), the fall poem Jeu d’Adam, and the Irish epic, The Cattle Raid of Cooley – the authorship of all of which has defied scholars.
In addition, there are those works we may consider “semi-anonymous”, to which can be attached only rather unconvincing, singular names like “Thomas” and “Béroul”: authors, respectively, of The Romance of Horn (ca. 1170) and the Norman French Tristan (ca. 1150) – figures about whom we know basically nothing other than their – it seems – manufactured appellations.
And even among Marie’s better-chronicled contemporaries there can scarce be found one who boasts a near-complete biographical profile. Naught is known with certainty, for instance, of Geoffrey de Monmouth, author of the History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136), except that he was ordained Bishop of St Asaph in 1152 – not his place of birth, his nationality, nor his mother tongue. And of Robert Wace and Chrétien de Troyes, authors, respectively, of the Roman de Brut and the best-known collection of early Arthurian romances, a similar picture can be painted. There is reason to believe that, around 1130, Wace took ecclesiastical work in Caen, Normandy, and that Troyes served at the court of the Countess of Champagne between 1160 and 1172. But aside from this, little can be confirmed beyond doubt.
And so, for her valiant efforts at self-promotion, Marie de France remained a daughter of her time; an authoress impeded by a human-diminishing metaphysic, and obscured by a god-oriented creative ethos.
When one takes a close look at Marie’s Lais, her short narrative poems of courtly love, one sees the Christian metaphysic at work in several subtle but important ways.
Her characterisations are monolithic and unnuanced. Protagonists are dichotomised into either all-good or all-bad, with very little attention given to psychological colour. In Guigemar, the first of the Lais, the knight is described as the ‘most handsome youngster in all the kingdom’. And, in Equitan, the steward’s lady is likewise depicted as without equal in the realm. Of Fresne, the fair maiden from the eponymous Lai, it is said, “In Brittany there wasn’t such a beautiful or so refined a girl and, similarly, of Gurun, the enamoured nobleman who pursues her: “there’s never been a better [Lord], before or since.” Conversely, the Knight’s envious wife is described as “deceitful, proud and evil-tongued”.
There is, admittedly, a degree of ambivalence, in Equitan, in the King’s wavering between love and duty:
I think I have no choice but to love her –
yet if I love her, I’m doing wrong;
she’s the wife of my seneschal.
I owe him the same faith and love
That I want him to give me.
While the king’s toing and froing between duty and lust may, at first, appear to indicate an unexpected degree of nuance - particularly for a King, the fabular archetype par excellence - Marie dashes our hopes of psychological complexity just as quickly as she raises them:
Don't think of me as your king,
But as your vassal and your love.
I tell you, I promise you
I’ll do whatever you want.
Don’t let me die on your account!
The king is, after all, the feeble sensualist we may have suspected he’d turn out to be.
Marie’s characters are black-and-white because the Christian principles she called upon them to exemplify are. Good and evil were, for Marie as for all her contemporaries, clear-cut and unquestionable concepts, determined by God and emanating from the Divine Logos. Marie’s characters are thus not realistic portraits but tools and symbols employed to convey immutable Christian truths to her audience.
Marie’s epistemological world is rock solid, as is the moral system she seeks to defend. In her Lais, the virtuous Christian is inevitably rewarded, while the iniquitous is punished. When Bisclavret’s wife is unmasked as a traitor to her werewolf husband, she has her nose bitten off by the very beast she’s betrayed, while the noble Bisclavret sees all his former lands re-instated by the King. In Equitan, the King is scalded to death instead of the stout-hearted vassal whose wife he was plotting to kill him for. Fresne’s mother, who, out of envy, spreads the lie that, if the wife of her husband’s brother-at-arms has fallen pregnant with twins, she must have laid with two men, is then ‘punished’ with twins herself. And conversely, her daughter and her love, Gurun are rewarded for their patience and obedience by finally being allowed to marry.
Certainly – what Marie lacks in characterological subtlety she makes up for in allegorical depth. And nowhere is her allegorical flair more evident than in her treatment of love in Guigemar, her most memorable Lai, and certainly her most psychoanalytically probing.
Guigemar, an ‘intelligent and brave’ knight, could have any and all of the fairest maids in the land, but spurns the all. Friends and family try in vain to set him up, but he proves not even slightly interested in love, and so all give him up for lost’. One day, he goes on a hunting expedition with his companions in arms. There, he encounters a hind whom he pierces with his arrow. When the arrow ricochets away from the hind and buries itself in Guigemar’s thigh, the hind places a very telling curse on him:
Neither herb nor root,
neither physician nor potion,
will cure you
of that wound in your thigh,
until a woman heals you,
one who will suffer, out of love for you,
pain and grief such as no woman ever suffered before.
And out of love for her, you'll suffer as much;
the affair will be a marvel
to lovers past and present
the affair will be a marvel.
The allegorical meaning here is clear. Guigemar, too immature and self-absorbed to love truly, finds, in the forest of his own mind, a symbol of his latent inner passions: the hind, or the terrifying idea of pure love he has long kept repressed. In life, he has hitherto been only the hunter – a hunter of women, of pleasures, of bounties – but never the hunted. He has never suffered for another, never given himself fully to the kind of love that rattles and transfigures the soul. When the arrow is deflected, he is pierced literally and figuratively. What he has inside him can no longer be ignored. And the only way he can be cured of his newfound pain is to delve deep inside himself and find that part of his inner self which is most vulnerable - and he must do this by means of true love.
Wounded and helpless, Guigemar staggers through the forest. He stumbles on an abandoned ship that takes him to faraway island where a fair lady is kept captive in a lonely tower by a jealous king. The lady sees Guigemar’s ship approaching, and her face “grows red with fear”. Here, we see Marie depicting love, at once, as person and as allegory. The unhappy Queen is, on a literal level, love’s unfulfilled captive, but, more symbolically, the caged soul of the romantically impaired knight himself, who has sailed the ship of his own consciousness to the innermost part of his being, where he simultaneously yearns to be healed by love and is terrified of its brutality.
Trapped in a tower and guarded jealously by the King’s henchmen, the Lady is, quite clearly, more deity than a flesh-and-blood woman. Her chamber is, tellingly, painted with images of Venus. But she is a Christian, rather a Pagan Aphrodite. She sits in her remote, inaccessible chamber, and her virtue is not her womanly allure but her chastity. To use the Augustinian distinction, she represents the godly love of the spirit, rather than baser, earthly love of the flesh. For Guigemar, to capture her is to walk into the City of God, to be redeemed from his foolish, childish notions. To fail is to suffer damnation. This dualism is rendered explicit when the Knight, having fallen under the spell of the Queen’s kindness and hospitality, realises all too clearly that his story can only end in one of two possible ways:
He didn’t know yet what was wrong,
But this much he could tell;
If the lady didn’t cure him,
He was sure to die
The Knight’s love for the captive Queen is presented as a pure, archetypal love, the Augustinian love of the spirit. And Marie’s portrayal invites parallels with medieval notions of the logos. Just as, through an embracing of Christ as the one path to truth, one finds salvation, here, too, one’s soul is redeemed through love; but not just any love – the platonic form of loves, the love of loves, or, in Christian terms, caritas, the selfless love of god.
Marie’s Lais lack subtlety, to be sure. In another age, Guigemar may have been an orphan, and the Lady, an underloved physician’s wife. But grandiloquent and unnuanced as they may be, Marie’s short tales of courtly love are profoundly of their time. What the medieval poetess is interested in, chiefly, is not human foibles and actions, but the principles they represent: the good and evil they reflect, and the godly moral Truth they illuminate.
