Marie De France Short Stories Analysis

Right off the bat, I found myself entertained and interested in the words that lied within the text of Marie’s first lay of the lais. I was absorbed, one could say, and couldn’t wait to dig deeper into the remaining eleven short stories. Most of Marie’s short stories are easy to read while understanding the dwelling of the knights and their love contingencies. The Lais of Marie de France is the perfect escape of a good medieval read for anyone who enjoys fairytales, like myself. As of right now, I may not know much about medieval poetry or even much about love, but I can definitely see why the mysterious Marie de France is quite the hot commodity among the medieval readers. Each and every one of her short stories uphold typical elements that

Excluding the antecedent available princess and the lady in Marie’s version of “Lanval”, most of these beautiful women are married, and the knights who come to rescue them are technically adulterers. Marie chastises none of them, surprisingly. The only characters who are punished suffer pain or death not because of their adultery type affairs, but because their secret love provoked them to commit other actions, such as murder. Undeniably, Marie seems to approve of adultery that is composed of the “purest” love. When his lover’s jealous husband kills one of the flamboyant knights, his death is trumpet to a great extent “unjust”, and the son he helped conceive is doomed to avenge the truth. Clearly, Marie’s stories function in their own universe, where women trapped in unhappy marriages have the lawful right to furnish love elsewhere, which is quite different from the church’s view or the act of courtly love. Her writing was popular, popular enough that we are still reading her works a thousand years later. So apparently there was something in common and vibrant enough about this sequence of events that allowed it to appeal to such an expanded audience. Safe to say Marie’s goals have been satisfied and