The Lais of Marie de France

Although recent literary scholarship posits that the Lais were likely the work of several authors, Claude Fauchet attributed them to a single woman named Marie de France in 1581, causing them to be regarded as the work of an individual author. The author, Marie de France, becomes conflated with the narrator in Guigemar when she addresses the crowd, saying, “hear, my lords, the words of Marie, who, when she has the opportunity, does not squander her talents” (43). Here, referring to herself in the third person, Marie aligns herself with her good reputation as a storyteller, rather than with any personal wish for power. She makes an appeal to the fact that “good material for a story” needs to be “well told”—a feat that only skilled narrators can manage (43). This sentiment is repeated throughout the Lais, drawing attention to the narrator’s continuous presence. Although the narrator derives her material from the Bretons, she makes clear that the lays are the fruit of her personal craft, when she specifies that they have been made into poems and were “worked on […] late into the night” (41).

When Marie the narrator addresses the topic of slander against her good name, she switches to first-person, making the bold and courageous