Esope au feminin: Marie de France et la politique de l'interculturalite

Medium Aevum, Spring, 2001 by Leslie C. Brook

Sahar Amer, Esope au feminin: Marie de France et la politique de l'interculturalite, Faux Titre 169 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), iv 246 pp. ISBN 90-420-0607-2. Hfl. 85.00/F. Fr. 255.00/25.50 [pounds sterling].

Sahar Amer seeks to remedy the tendency, which she sees as widespread, to ignore the indirect Arabic influence on medieval French literature, and in particular on Marie de France's Fables. Pointing to the number of scholars from England who, in the course of the twelfth century, travelled abroad in search of Arab scientific or philosophical wisdom, she plausibly surmises that alongside this knowledge there would have been the transmission of a storytelling tradition, even if only orally. Marie de France would doubtless have been aware of this intellectual and cultural contact, and while the Romulus Nilantii, an eleventh-century Latin prose compilation, has long been accepted as the fundamental source of the first forty of her Fables, the influence of an eighth-century Arabic collection, the Kalilah wa Dimnah, is also detectable in the Fables in general. Marie may well have known of this collection orally through an English translator (the mysterious Alfred of the epilogue?), and used it to reinterpret in her own way existing fables. The Romulus Nilantii reflects the Christianization of the Latin fable tradition, which was always basically didactic in intent, and the exempla it contains deal unambiguously with good and evil within a rigid moral framework. The Kalilah wa Dimnah, on the other hand, was not destined for a clerical readership, although it contained didactic elements. It was deliberately literary and entertaining, and invited the reader to discover a deeper meaning through his own interpretation, as it propounded no rigid, universal truth. Without slavishly reproducing the oriental tradition, Marie follows it in foregrounding the poetic narrative rather than the dogmatic moral of the Latin collection. Her fables therefore provide no overall clear moral lesson, as she allows that of one fable to be contradicted in another: ruse and deceit depend entirely on circumstance, and not on an absolute, predetermined moral stance. There are instances, too, in which the stated moral fits ill with the situation of the story, leaving the reader to reflect on its inadequacy. In this way Marie casts aside the authoritarian discourse of the Latin tradition, while the reader becomes a necessary participant in the interpretation of the stories. Similarly in the representation of animals, there is no fixed typology, so that the presentation of a particular animal depends upon the situation: a lion is not always strong, a fox does not always win by ruse. In her final chapter Amer uses this perceived refusal to stereotype to read Marie through feminist eyes, stating that the female creatures and characters in the Fables are deliberately not portrayed according to medieval patriarchal and Christian perceptions of womankind.

The question of an Arabic source for Marie's Fables is not completely new, but Amer explores it with authority. Two slight reservations might be expressed, however, concerning this otherwise stimulating book: the allusions, particularly in the introductory chapter, to the perceived shortcomings of other scholars are rather over-insistent, while the feminist analysis of Marie comes close to making her seem out of her time.

LESLIE C. BROOK

Birmingham