The "Lais" of Marie de France: Text and Context

The present volume examines twelve poems which have come down to us in manuscript Harley 978 of the British Library. These poems are known individually as lays or 'lais' and collectively as the "Lais" of Marie de France. We are able, in the first instance, to attribute the collection to a specific author because the name Marie appears in the prologue to the first of the lays: "Oëz, seignurs, ke dit Marie" ("Guigemar", v. 3). The full name of Marie de France derives from the epilogue to a collection of fables also found in the Harley manuscript: "Marie ai num, si sui de France" (v. 4). The generally held conviction that Marie de France wrote the "Fables" and all the lays in the Harley collection underpins the current book, but the possibility does exist that the two authors were not one and the same person and, more importantly for our purposes, that the twelve lays in the Harley collection were not written by the same person. It is hoped that the present study, which brings forward a number of thematic and textual parallels, will help in preparing the way for a future reevaluation of the authorship of works currently attributed to Marie de France. The Harley lays were composed in the second half of the twelfth century and they include a total of around 5,770 lines of text.