The Anonymous Marie de France [Paperback]

R. Howard Bloch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0226059847 | ISBN-13: 978-0226059846

The Anonymous Marie de France offers a fundamental reconception of the person generally assumed to be the first woman writer in French, the woman now referred to as Marie de France. Written by renowned medievalist R. Howard Bloch, it is the first book 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. 

Marie is, Bloch asserts, one of the most self-conscious, sophisticated, and disturbing figures of her time—a writer whose works reveal an acute awareness not only of her role in the preservation of cultural memory, but also of the transformative psychological, social, and political effects of her writing within an oral tradition. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"After eight centuries of tenebrous obscurity, France's first woman poet once again emerges into the light." - Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University"

From the Inside Flap

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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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (May 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226059847
• ISBN-13: 978-0226059846
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,473,852 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars O lais, June 3, 2003

By 

Alvaro Lewis "jwatson5" (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Anonymous Marie de France (Hardcover)

How wonderful to recieve an expertly guided tour through the corpus of Marie de France! Bloch writes in part to show the continuity of ideas and forms in the three works attributed to the twelfth century poet Marie de France. The Lais of Marie de France still receive attention in first year university humanities class. Bloch seems to reach a bit far in his effort to show Marie's "obsession with language". Bloch pleasingly works through the fables and shows the educative value of talking animals as well as the political values they reflect. The final work Bloch addresses is Marie's Saint Patrick's Purgatory. Bloch's final chapter on discussing Ireland and the colonization of purgatory is absolutely fabulous. Bloch uses different methods (deconstructive criticism, psychoanalytical criticism, new historicism) to approach Marie's texts, but this diversely constructed philology creates some stunning results. There is much to admire in this new book by Bloch. I am convinced it will make extraordinarily useful reading for those interested in Marie de France or early French literature and history. Analysis of the poetry, rhythms,and forms is lacking, perhaps because such analysis matters not as much as Marie's and Bloch's obsession for language.