Everyone loves a writer with a mysterious identity. Elena Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon, Ann Radcliffe—we just can't get enough. But what of Marie de France, the medieval writer who became France's first female poet, and whose mysterious identity continues to torment scholars over eight centuries later? Details of Marie's life are ambiguous, hotly contested, and above all, quite scarce, making her the perfect candidate for your next obsession. Now that Marie is the subject of an acclaimed new novel, Lauren Groff's Matrix, the enduring mysteries of her life and work are coming into view for a broader audience.

Related Stories

In Matrix, Groff imagines her way into the life and lore of Marie. In Groff's version of events, cast out from the court by her sometimes-lover Eleanor of Acquitaine, seventeen-year-old Marie washes up at an impoverished English abbey, where she transforms from a reluctant resident to a fiercely devoted leader. Through great works of construction and community, Abbess Marie fashions the now-wealthy and influential abbey into an “island of women,” all while furtively writing the divinely-inspired poems that made her name. These poems were the Lais, a collection of twelve narrative poems based on Breton folklore, which continue to loom large in the pantheon of medieval literature.

To provide insight into the mysteries of Marie's life and work, we called in Dr. Claire Waters, a professor of English at the University of California Davis, who specializes in medieval religious literature and culture. Waters recently published a facing-page translation of The Lais of Marie de France, and says of the poet, "I've never known anyone to meet Marie and not find her interesting." From clues about Marie's identity to insight into the distinctive characteristics of her work, read on for a crash course in everything Marie de France.

Esquire: It seems that there are few clear answers about who Marie de France was and what the circumstances of her life were. Asking what scholars “know” may be too strong a word, so I'll put it this way: what do scholars suspect to be true about who Marie was, and how and where she lived?

Claire Waters: Who exactly Marie was is a hotly disputed, long-standing mystery. There have been occasional suggestions that it's a pen name, or that it's actually a man writing under a woman's name. I don't think that's very likely. I don't see what the advantage of that would have been. We have one contemporary reference to a Dame Marie who writes lais. It’s possible someone made up everything about her, which there's no way to disprove, but I think that’s unlikely. We assume that she was indeed a lady named Marie. When I say a lady, I say that because she was obviously well-educated. She could read and compose in more than one language. She also has a real sense of the academic tradition. She mentions the grammarian Priscian, and Ovid, too—Latin authors who were part of the standard educational scheme. It’s not as if there were no educated women in the Middle Ages; there were, but the likeliest contexts for those women were an aristocratic household or a nunnery. Those are the places where women were the most likely to be educated.

Marie de France.

The lais are dedicated to King Henry, which is usually taken to mean Henry II, who was married to Eleanor of Acquitaine. Another of Marie's works is dedicated to a Count William. Unfortunately, there were many Counts William at the time, but again, it leads us to an aristocratic setting. Another work, though less definitively linked to Marie, is The Life of Saint Audrey, which is dedicated to a good man—no name given. It’s about the aristocrat Saint Audrey, who herself was royal and became a nun. It’s interesting to consider that perhaps Marie herself had the same trajectory.

We all believe that Marie wrote the Lais. We aren’t sure if she wrote the Fables. Many people think she wrote something called St. Patrick's Purgatory. There’s an argument about whether she wrote The Life of Saint Audrey. But in the Fables, she says, “Marie is my name, I am from France.” You wouldn't specify that you were from France if you were in France. It would be strange. The assumption is that she was perhaps born in France and moved to England, which would not have been at all in uncommon. This is only about a century after the Norman conquest; there was a lot of traffic and a huge amount of connection between the two countries. Aristocratic and well-educated goes with the territory there. Connected to some courts, seemingly, and probably French, but writing in England. None of it's absolutely certain, but that's the core belief.

ESQ: Some sources theorize that Marie was perhaps an illegitimate child of one of the Plantagenets. Could that be plausible?

CW: That would be so great, in some ways. We would love to find her, and maybe one day we will. I think that particular theory isn't very widely held anymore. It's not impossible, but there has not been the confirming or corresponding evidence that would make it more than a cool possibility. I can see why circumstantially it’s of interest; both men and women were sometimes put into monastic life because they were part of a family with no place for them. People have theorized that she was perhaps Marie the Abbess of Shaftesbury. There are a number of possibilities that have been floated, but none of it has ever built up the body of evidence that would get us much closer to fact.

ESQ: What do you think of Matrix's portrayal of Marie and Eleanor of Acquitaine as lovers?

CW: That’s fascinating. Actually, there's a novel called Hild about Abbess Hild of Whitby, a much earlier royal saint, that similarly depicts her in a relationship with another woman. It’s all intriguing, but the possible historicity of that—who can say? Often it’s not uncommon for people in very high positions in the Middle Ages, if they may have been what we would now call gay, that there is some perception of that. I'm not aware of that with Eleanor, though I'm not an expert on Eleanor. But the thing that's really fascinating about that is the last of Marie’s lais is this very interesting and unusual love triangle involving two women and a man. Both of the women are in love with the man, but there's also this fascinating scene with two weasels, where one of the weasels rescues her friend.

Eleanor of Acquitaine.

The pronouns strongly suggest that both of the weasels are feminine. That’s a model for one of the women to rescue the other. There’s this very powerful, redemptive, restorative female bond in the final lai that, in some ways, talks back to the much more common “two men fighting over one woman” situation, which we often suggest indicates a strong bond between men. There's a whole thing about rivalrous desire and the homosocial nature of fighting over a woman, where maybe the woman is the way you actually connect to each other. That some principle would apply to a triangle of the other shape.

ESQ: What was new and unique about Marie’s approach to the existing Breton lai form?

CW: The tricky thing about Breton lais is that they seem to have circulated orally. We see things that are called lais, but Marie gives the sense that she's translating these into French, out of Breton, and into written form. It’s possible she expanded them. There are moments where she writes things that make us think perhaps a Breton lai was more compact and less narrative than what has come down to us. It certainly was musical—sung with musical accompaniment. The traces that we have are the written culture that picked the lais up and transformed them. But from our perspective, one thing she does is bring the lai into the written tradition.

If you imagine taking up a song that has a clear, implicit narrative, like a pop song, and turning it into a story, it seems that might be one way to understand what she was doing. The fascinating thing about Marie’s lais is that they have a prologue. Marie tells us that the ancient writers used to write things somewhat obscurely. There’s a lot of dispute about this, but what she seems to be saying is that people who came later could work on her lais, think about them, interpret for themselves, and “apply the supplement of their understanding”—that’s one of the ways this gets translated.

Broadview Press The Lais of Marie de France

Clearly this is Marie placing herself in a tradition. She imagines future readers for herself, who will work on what she’s written and think about it. That gets borne out in the lais, because they're sometimes described as casuistry: that is, thinking through different situations around love relationships. There’s not a formula or a single answer; these are complicated, and people disagree. That last lai about the two women and the man has traditionally traveled under the name of the man, but Marie makes pretty clear in the lai that it should travel under the names of the women. When I translated them, I put under the names of the women. People disagree about whether the point is that the man is a total cad, or whether the selfless love of the women creates a beautiful and redemptive story. You can argue about almost all the lais, and people do. Marie brought them into that intellectual frame, which isn't to say that the Breton lais were anti-intellectual, but that wasn’t their original context.

ESQ: Were Marie’s works popular or widely read during her lifetime?

CW: We think they were. There’s the evidence of Denis Piramus, the monk who was writing The Life of St. Edmund the King. Then there’s this Lady Marie, who writes lais that all the counts and dukes are crazy about, and according to Denis Piramus, what everybody should be doing is reading saint's lives. He doesn’t name any of her lais, but her writes that there was a Lady Marie who wrote popular lais. There are several copies of them, but only one manuscript has all twelve of the lais we now attribute to her, and the prologue. There’s a translation of almost all of them into old Norse, from around fifty years later. There are also Middle English translations of some of them. Clearly they were known in England even beyond her lifetime. We don't know how long the French versions continued to circulate, but they definitely did. They definitely had a reading public.

ESQ: What are the thematic interests of these lais? Was Marie socially ahead of her time?

CW: Most of the lais, if they bear a human name, bear the man's name. That’s part of why that last lai is so interesting. In the very first lai, we start with the story of Guigemar, who is what we would now call asexual. Everybody is worried about him because he has no interest in falling in love. “You're a young nobleman—you need a wife.” He shoots a magic deer, then the arrow rebounds and wounds him. He then has to find a lady to fall in love with. When Guigemar falls for a married woman, they’re found out by her husband, and he gets sent back away in his magic boat. Then we switch to following the lady. Marie doesn't only focalize women, but she certainly will sometimes only follow the woman's perspective, or switch back and forth between them. There definitely were other tales, like romances and saints’ lives, with women at the center. But the consistent detail with which Marie thinks through women's perspectives is distinctive. Her consistent attention to that is not unique, but distinctive. Her sympathetic imagination is considerable. The fact that she was a woman writer in this time is in itself extraordinary; it gives different resonance to who she chooses to focalize.

Riverhead Books Matrix

Now 48% Off

ESQ: Is it true that Marie often depicted marriage as a prison?

CW: Yes—sometimes literally. In Guigemar, the lady is actually imprisoned by her old husband. There's another lai, Yonec, with a similar situation, where a wife is kept under guard and not permitted even to go to church, which is extreme. The lady makes a complaint about it, saying, “Curse my relatives! You married me off to this horrible man who doesn't love me and doesn't have any interest in me as a person.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. That’s the lament that makes her fairy beloved appear to her. In other cases, she depicts love matches in marriage. There’s one lai about a werewolf whose wife is terrified that he's a werewolf. Marie writes of how frightened she is when she finds this out, and she basically traps him in his werewolf form. There we see a prison, but the gendering of the prison is quite different.

Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, England. Some scholars theorize that Marie de France was Marie, the Abbess of Shaftesbury.

ESQ: Were there ways in which Marie challenged the traditions or the authority of the Church?

CW: Marie and the Church were competing for audiences. That’s the point of Denis Piramus’ comments: “Don’t read her thing—read my thing.” By their very nature, romances, which often valorize adulterous love and other behaviors not smiled upon by the Church, were not contributing to the Christian project. They’re not doing any serious undermining, though. There's actually one fascinating moment in Yonec, when the imprisoned lady’s beloved comes to her as a hawk who transforms into a man. She says, “Who are you? What are you?” To prove himself to her, he takes on her appearance, gets in her bed, takes communion, and recites the creed to prove that he is a Christian. There are moments like this where Marie calls on Christian authority to almost approve the match, which you could see as deliberate undermining. But I think it’s also a way of acknowledging this important structure of belief. Her two religious works are pretty well in keeping with other religious works of the time.

ESQ: Scholars disagree about Marie's involvement with the tradition of courtly love and chivalric literature. Some argue that she established this genre or was a trailblazer in this space. Others insist that she was simply part of an ongoing tradition. Where do you come down on that?

CW: The problem with the discussion is that it depends so much on the implicit argument of using the term courtly love. Insofar as Marie writes about love primarily in aristocratic settings, that clearly is courtly love, by a basic definition, but there's been a lot of dispute about what courtly love is, and whether the term is valid. This is part of a broader question about what's distinctive and novel about what she's doing, and whether she changes the traditions of love stories in high-born settings. We can tell that she read other romances of her time. There are moments where she really seems to be echoing or drawing on another text. We don't actually know whether it's a source for her, or she's a source for it.

McFarland and Company, Inc. The Life of Saint Audrey

This also goes back to Ovid, who writes about how you find a lover and how you escape love. Marie clearly knows both of those texts. In addition to writing from a female perspective, I think what’s interesting about her work is her argument that literature is a place for serious thought. Her poems are a place for thinking about and solving problems. That might be one of the most distinctive elements of her work.

ESQ: How did Marie influence the poets and the writers who came after her?

CW: Except in cases where it's a translation of her work, it's a little harder than it might be. There was enough circulation of her works that we know they were out in the world, but it’s harder to trace a genealogy from her than one might like. What does seem to be the case is that she helped instantiate and popularize the concept of Breton lai as a genre that one could claim, or draw on, or point to. The brevity and tightness of Marie’s lais is also noteworthy—they're quite short. Most works that we call romances, though not all, are longer than most of the lais. Most of the lais are in the realm of 500 or 600 lines long, which is pretty short, and most romances are longer. They also tend to be very dense, and to have these very numinous objects at their center. Some of those resonances are things that you see in later literature; that said, you can't always trace them directly to Marie. But I think having someone who claimed and named this genre of the Breton lai, and made it available for the imagination—that’s where you see her impact.

ESQ: The concept of feminism as you and I understand it wouldn’t have been familiar to Marie, but there seems to be an impulse to recognize her as a proto-feminist figure. “The first woman to write poetry in French”—people often want to anoint her in this way. Do you think it's fair to call her a proto-feminist figure?

CW: Yes, insofar as pretty much any woman in the Middle Ages who was willing to compose and put her name to it is a proto-feminist figure. Such a woman is to some degree bucking a tradition that says the locus of authority is men, and women must defer to them. It’s fascinating to see a woman who is willing to claim her name strongly. That's why we can attribute these works to Marie. There may be other things that women wrote and didn't put their names to, for religious or practical reasons, that are now lost in time. Claiming authority to write romances is not quite as disruptive as claiming authority to write religious works or hold religious authority, but it's not a completely neutral thing to do. In that sense, I think it's fair to say that this is someone who was willing to take a role that was not easily and readily available to her, and to claim it really emphatically.

The thing I find so interesting about the four works is that all of them, very close to where they bring up the name Marie, say either that she wants to be remembered, or that she does not forget herself, or that she wants these stories to be held in memory. Memory is not an unusual concept and Marie is not an unusual name, but to have them next to each other so strongly, and to have this sense of “remember my name”—that’s a statement. In her refusal of moralistic interpretations of behavior, which can be used against women, especially women who are having affairs with persons to whom they are not married… Marie makes that a site of a real complexity and sympathy. There’s some real proto-feminist energy there.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xKernqqklravucSnq2ian6S4tHvAbG5scWdrgXd71qGmZq%2BRqHqurdGinGaclWKzs63NnJxmpZGpv6rEjKWYrqqVo3qovs6fnWg%3D