Anonymous Marie de France, The

Romanic Review, May 2004 by Creamer, Paul

The Anonymous Marie de France. By R. Howard Bloch. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 367.

Karl Warnke began his groundbreaking 1925 critical edition of Marie de France's Lais with a brief, one-sentence paragraph: "Marie de France is the first poetess in the history of French literature to make a name and a reputation for herself" (III, my translation). If we look back on this cryptic profile now, we realize how much it left unsaid, unexplored, and unknown. Does Marie having (apparently) been a poetess rather than a poet require us to marshal forth a gender-coded appreciation of her work? Because the individual we call "Marie de France" left virtually no biographical trace in the writings attributed to her, and because researchers have yet to conclusively identify her, may we nonetheless claim that she "made a name" for herself, or even had such an ambition? And because every individual text credited to Marie derives from an attested model or, nearly all scholars suspect, from a now-lost written or orally transmitted antecedent, should we consider her reputation to be that of an author, or more properly that of a translator? Paradoxically, our lack of knowledge about Marie makes us all the more eager increase our understanding of this fascinating figure, yet all the more discouraged when attempting to compose a full portrait of her.

R. Howard Bloch has not been deterred. In his new study The Anonymous Marie de France, his ambition for seizing and understanding the totality of Marie's output is great: "[...]! am wagering that it is possible to prove from within not only the coherence of Marie's oeuvre but that, far from being the simple, naive, natural, spontaneous, delicate, modest, clear sincere, comforting, Christian figure she has been portrayed to be, Marie is among the most self-conscious, sophisticated, complicated, obscure, tricky, and disturbing figures of her time-the Joyce of the twelfth century" (19). Because the book bears an ambiguous title and is broad and complex, let us first itemize the fields that it chooses not to examine and then list the areas that it does explore. This study is not concerned with the manuscript tradition or the codicological riddles of Marie's works, nor does it systematically retrace the accretive judgments that allow scholars of today to comfortably ascribe the Lais, the Fables, and the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz to a one and the same author whom we name "Marie de France." Further, the book treats only briefly the various historical figures whom researchers over the centuries have unearthed and ushered forward as being "the" Marie in question. What The Anonymous Marie de France does explore, and explores with great skill and nuance, is the vast yet subtle mind of this polymath poet and the three works it produced.

A summary of this dense and rich study will be useful, if admittedly oversimplified. Chapter 1 concerns itself with Marie's self-appointed mission as a preserver of lays, aware of the polyvalence of language and willfully complex in her style, while Chapters 2 and 3 continue to focus on how language in the Lais perturbs, baffles, and even traps both the characters within and the reading/listening audience without, all by Marie's express design. Chapter 4 moves to the Fables, considering how they too revolve around, and are propelled by, the slipperiness and opacity of language. This chapter convincingly argues that Marie constructs the Lais in such a way that their characters wilt under external forces, while the Fables' personages (mostly animals, alas) are either empowered or doomed by their own internal processes of decision-making. The sense of logic, social order, and upward and downward mobility that Marie's collection of fables might have incited in the mind of the contemporaneous reader/listener is explored in Chapters 5 and 6, along with a description of some of the educational and philosophical forces that might have informed Marie's Grafting of her collection. Chapter 7 fixes the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz in the surprisingly broad constellation of Latin and vernacular texts with which it shares either roots or thematic characteristics, and also probes several instances where Marie's translation stealthily slips away from its chief model, the only slightly older Tractatus Sancti Patricii of the Cistercian monk Henry of Saltrey. The Espuragatoire's particular interdigitation of language, memory, and hope and despair situates it, Chapter 8 argues persuasively, at a midpoint between the Lais and the Fables, texts constructed of the same raw materials but each in a different manner. Chapter 9 delicately inserts the Espuragatoire, as encoded cultural touchstone, into the political reality of the Anglo-Normans' invasion and subsequent administration of Ireland, with emphasis on the text's exploitation of the symbolic idea of purgatory. The book also contains a brief and worthwhile introduction and conclusion, as well as detailed and satisfying endnotes, organized by chapter.