Faith and Social Requirements of Feudalism

A legendary gasconade of knightly social organization was the presence of peripatetic troubadours, who sang or told various tales to their audiences and to whom Marie refers in the get-go paragraph of the first tale. In invoking the minstrels, Marie is also invoking their storytelling authority to reinforce her own, at at once accounting for and unloosening the fact that a mere woman has store these various tales. Indeed, Marie invokes a third-party source for all of her tales. "The Lay of the sorrowful Knight" and "The Lay of the Nightingale" supposedly come from "harpers," a reference to troubadours' musical instruments, and she assigns the source of most of the stories to Brittany. She imputes to herself the role of incorruptible recorder, thus demurring from taking original-story credit for herself.

Marie's authorial demurrer is logical with divided opinion closely her real-life identity. accord to Evergates, Marie de France was the countess of Champagne, was the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII. He cites her vigorous intrusion into French royal politics in behalf of her son Henry as well as her to a greater extent successful efforts at seeing that her children were all well-married to fellow aristocrats. Evergates declares Marie to relieve oneself been a "literary patron" of such romanciers as ChrTtien de Troyes (79). According to ThiTbaux, Marie de France's identity is not necessarily settled. Sh

Whoever this Marie was, she was completely familiar with the expectations of aristocratic social convention--and with how to subvert it. Her pass theme is the complications of love among the nobility. "The Honeysuckle: Chevrefoil" is a digression about Tristan and Isolde that articu posthumouss and endorses courtly though forbidden love; in "The leave behind and the Knight," a just-bereaved woman determines that life must go on after meeting a handsome stranger and exposes her late husband's body to the elements so as to save (and take up with) the condemned knight who has defied a law against burying his executed fellow (ThiTbaux 288-9).

Evergates, Theodore, ed. Aristocratic Women in Medieval France. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.

The draft of vulnerable women may be somewhat misleading. To be sure, medieval aristocratic marriage and social relations were a bet of property and "social necessity" dominated by men, and at that place is a view that courtly love "supported the male-dominated social order rather than subverted it" (Kelly-Gadol 181). Guinevere, the central Arthurian heroine, is the prototype of women in the case. Her fall, like the fall of the heroine in "The Nightingale," can be seen to justify severe social and personal sanctions on women. On the another(prenominal) hand, Marie portrays the adulterous couple sympathetically and the betrayed husband as plenteous of "wrath and malice" (Marie V). That is consistent with and to an extent a footnote on the conventions of courtly love, which made high-born women the object of desire to be served and adored by the knightly lover outside the matrimonial context. In "Nightingale," wherein the villainous husband suspects his wife, the lady of the house is not locked away as in "Gugemar." That suppo
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