![]() ![]() Changing Places: The Fables and Social Mobility Of all the readers I could have imagined she would have been the best, and she still lives as the conjured voice, not silent yet, behind the words.Īcknowledgments ix Note on Texts xi Introduction The Word Aventure and the Adventure of Words Aventure Lai History, Philology, and the Quest for Origins The Obligation to Speak The Will to Remember “Guigemar” If Words Could Kill: The Lais and Fatal Speech Marie mal mariée “Lanval” and “Laüstic” “Equitan” and “Le Fresne” “Bisclavret” The Voice in the Tomb of the Lais “Eliduc” “Les Deus Amanz” and “Chaitivel” “Milun” and “Chevrefoil” “Yonec” Beastly Talk: The Fables The Fables and the Lais Speech Acts in the Fables An Ethics of Language , ‒ The joy of sending this little book into the world is tempered by the sudden death of my beloved wife Naomi on December . .- o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z.–. Includes bibliographical references and index. ![]() Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloch, R. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Published Paperback edition Printed in the United States of America : --- (cloth) : --- (paperback) This book is published with the assistance of the Frederick W. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. The University of Chicago Press / Chicago and London 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. 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. And in her Espurgatoire, she produces a startling examination of the afterlife which Bloch links to the English conquest and occupation of medieval Ireland. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In the face of this great writer's near anonymity, scholars have assumed her to be a simple, naive, and modest Christian figure. 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.Įvidence 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. ![]() 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. ![]()
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