English 271

After nearly eight centuries and much research and writing on Marie de France, the only biographical information we know about her, with any degree of certainty, is that she was from France and wrote for the Anglo-Angevin court of Henry II. Yet Marie de France remains today one of the most prominent literary voices of the end of the twelfth century and was the first woman of letters to write in French. The chapters in this book are composed by scholars who have specialized in Marie de France studies, in most cases for many years. Offering traditional views alongside new critical perspectives, the authors discuss many different aspects of her poetics.

The twelve "lays" of Marie de France, the earliest known French woman poet, are here presented in sprightly English verse by poet and translator David R. Slavitt. Traditional Breton folktales were the raw material for Marie de France's series of lively but profound considerations of love, life, death, fidelity and betrayal, and luck and fate. They offer acute observations about the choices that women make, startling in the late twelfth century and challenging even today. Combining a woman's wisdom with an impressive technical bravura, the lays are a minor treasure of European culture.

One of the most influential storytellers in Western literature, French poet Chrétien de Troyes helped to shape the ever-fascinating legend of King Arthur and the Round Table. Of Chrétien's five surviving romantic Arthurian poems, the last and longest is Perceval, an unfinished work that introduces the story of the Grail--a legend quickly adopted by other medieval writers and taken up by a continuing succession of authors. In Chrétien's romance, Perceval progresses from a naive boyhood in rural seclusion to a position of high respect as a knight at Arthur's court. With the help of two teachers--his mother and Gornemant of Goort--Perceval is ultimately able to reject the worldly adventures chosen by other knights and seek important moral and spiritual answers. Acclaimed for his sensitive and faithful translations of the poems of Chrétien, Burton Raffel completes the Arthurian series with this rendition of Perceval. Raffel conveys to the modern English language reader all the delights of Chrétien's inventive storytelling, perceptive characterizations and vividly evoked emotions.