The Anonymous Marie de France / R. Howard Bloch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bloch, R. Howard, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Marie, de France, active 12th century--Criticism and interpretation.

Marie.

Marie, --de France, -- active 12th century--Criticism and interpretation.

Local Subjects:

Marie, --de France, -- active 12th century--Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (381 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2011]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Texts

Introduction

Chapter One. The Word Aventure and the Adventure of Words

Chapter Two. If Words Could Kill: The Lais and Fatal Speech

Chapter Three. The Voice in the Tomb of the Lais

Chapter Four. Beastly Talk: The Fables

Chapter Five. Changing Places: The Fables and Social Mobility at the Court of Henry II

Chapter Six. Marie's Fables and the Rise of the Monarchic State

Chapter Seven. A Medieval "Best Seller"

Chapter Eight. Between Fable and Romance

Chapter Nine. The Anglo-Norman Conquest of Ireland and the Colonization of the Afterlife

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9786613150677

9781283150675

1283150670

9780226059693

0226059693

OCLC:

721195328