L'Esope de Marie de France, translatio du Ramulus Nilantii

Abstract

This paper examines the first French fable collection written by Marie de France. While current criticism maintains that Marie merely "translated" an eleventh century Latin fable collection, the Romulus Nilantii (RN), a close analysis of her recueil and a comparison between the two collections suggest that she is far from being a faithful slave to her model text and that she is in fact interpreting, re-writing and thus recreating the genre of the fable. Since the RN is thought to have been a textbook used in the cloister schools, it adopts a Christian attitude, categorically opposes truth to falsity and offers pre-packaged morals. In her Esope, Marie de France subverts the didactic, univocal and authoritative stance of the Latin tradition. She redefines the genre of the fable through her use of the verse and various innovative formal transformations of the fable genre. Furthermore, she questions the acceptance of the fable as a didactic instrument. Language itself becomes the theme of the Esope and each fable a reflection on the status of language and its duplicity. That Marie's project was essentially polemical, and not didactic, can be seen in her challenge of Isidore of Seville's traditional opposition between fable and history and his valorisation of historia at the expense of fabula. Marie has re-written and thus re-created the genre of the fable. Her work can no longer be considered a simple replica of the Latin fable tradition, but must be regarded as an innovative literary creation in its own right.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.