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THE UNANONYMOUS MARIE DE FRANCE
«Not only do John of
Salisbury, Walter Map, Nigel Wireker, Thomas Becket and Gerald of Wales
share with Marie a common obsession with the psychological causes and
social effects of envy, but the terms they use are so similar as to seem
traceable less to the spiit of the age, especially since the themeis less
prevalent in France than in Anglo-Normandy, than to a shared social
milieu. [...] What I am suggesting is not only that the dates of Hue de
Rotelande's literary activity, like those of John of Salisbury and Walter
Map, coincide with those of Marie, but that the coincidence of interest
[...] sets a context for our undestanding of Marie [...]».
R. H. Bloch, The anonymous Marie de France, Chicago 2003, pp.156-157.
For the benefit of English and American colleagues I would
like to sum up the background to my research, the results of which appear
in my volumes, with the title
Marie, ki en sun tens pas ne s'oblie; Maria di Francia:
la Storia oltre l'enigma [the story beyond the enigma],
Bagatto Libri, Rome
2007 and Marie de France
et les érudits de Cantorbéry, Editions Classiques Garnier, Paris 2009.
Marie
is the signature appended to four ancient French literary works dating
back to the XII century which have come down to us: Lais, Fables,
Espurgatoire Seint Patriz and Vie Seinte Audree. Whilst
there is consensus about attributing the first three to the same author,
in 2002, June Hall McCash put forward a theory about Vie Seinte
Audree, which though analysed correctly in terms of stylistic and
linguistic content, was incomplete; her suggestion was also to
attribute to the same author the hagiographic Anglo-Norman short poem on
the Life of Santa Etheldreda of Ely, a Saxon queen and abbess. The text,
in which Marie's stylistic mannerisms are ungainsayably recognisable, has
come down to us from a single source and accords well with the pattern
which is common to all the poetess’s works, a pattern closely related in
its deep structure, to the cultural programme pursued by the circle of
Canterbury scholars, whose purpose was to “establish traditional, epochal
genealogical and religious foundations for courtly Anglo-Norman Society".
My research commenced in 2004 with an article for the
magazine Critica del Testo, in which I refuted Yolande de
Pontfarcy’s theory, propounded in 1995, which on the basis of Holmes’ 1932
study, had suggested that the poetess was none other than Marie de Meulan.
In Holmes’ opinion, she was not only the wife of Hugh Talbot, Baron of
Cleuville, but also, and more to the point, the putative daughter of one
of the
milites letterati
of
Anglo-Norman England, Waleran IV de Meulan, to whom the first version of
the Historia Regum Britannie by Geoffrey of Monmouth was
dedicated (1136). Though Holmes complained that he was unable to find any
documentary evidence, he nonetheless steadfastly contended that Marie de
Meulan and the poetess were one and the same person. I therefore took it
upon myself to investigate this supposed gap in the archives and, without
a shadow of doubt, on the basis of the surviving documents relating to the
family to which the Holmes/Pontefarcy school would have Marie de France
belong, it is possible to affirm the following: Waleran IV de Meulan
married Agnès de Montfort between 1130 and 1142; Agnes received as her
maritagium from her brother the Gournay-sur-Marne estates. The
couple’s children, whose existence is attested to in archive documents (of
course there may have been more children allowing for some who did not
reach adulthood), six boys (Raoul, Amaury I, Etienne, Robert, Roger,
Waleran V) and a girl (who was given the name of her paternal grandmother,
Isabelle), were born between 1130 and 1150. Waleran, born in 1104, died a
monk in Preaux monastery on 10 April 1166; Agnès died on 15 December 1181.
It is also worthy of note
that the Beaumont de Meulan family, at the behest of Waleran IV and his
twin brother, did not always use the de Meulan name in England as it was
starting to become meaningless in the context of Anglo-Norman aristocracy.
Waleran IV therefore signed many documents under the name Comes
de Wigornia, meaning count of Worcester (he had received the
title and earldom from the King in 1144), having a seal specially created,
bearing on one side the words: Sigillum Gualeranni comitis Mellenti,
and on the other: Sigillum Gualeranni comitis Wigornie. It is
therefore self-evident that his daughter would have had no reason to call
herself "de France" even though Y. de Pontfarcy maintains, at the end of
her article: “To conclude, Marie de Beaumont de Meulan could easily have
claimed the name "de France", as a descendant of King Henry 1st
of France and also as a reference to her native country, had she been born
at Meulan”.
The conclusion is wholly
appropriate: "had she had been born"! In fact, no such Marie
was born.
Are we to assume that
Holmes and others, who, on the basis of their studies, supported the
theory that Marie de France could be Marie de Meulan, were acting in ill
faith? Simply stated, as I have documented in the book, there was a
trifling misunderstanding, carelessness in reading the archive papers, as
it is the very archives which amply attest to the existence of a Marie de
Meulan who was however born around the year 1000, in France, daughter of
Waleran II de Meulan (an ancestor of Waleran IV) and Oda de Conteville,
who had at least one son, Hugh (Hugue II, ~1018-1053) as well as another
daughter: Adeliza, Alisende or Amice. The misunderstanding about Waleran
IV’s supposed third daughter obviously stems from this (indeed the name
cited by Y. de Pontfarcy for the third daughter is the same).
The confusion was caused by
the fact that Waleran IV, Earl of Worcester, appears in some documents as
Waleran II de Beaumont-le-Roger (second Count of Beaumont-le-Roger to bear
the name Waleran ), but fourth Count of Meulan: It is a simple mistake to
confuse him with his Norman ancestor. Amongst other things, the list of
the documents issued by him, edited in 1960, bears the modern title
Galeran II, comte de Meulan, Catalogue de ses actes...: the error of
mistaking him for his namesake ancestor, father of Marie de Meulan, was to
be expected, not to say inevitable; nevertheless, on chronological
grounds, it is just not possible to equate her with the poet. But there is
more: around 1030, the real Marie de Meulan, whose existence is attested
to by the archive papers, actually married Hugh Talbot, Baron of Cleuville.
More to the point, a clue which ought to have aroused suspicions in
philologists willing to give credence to Holmes is the toponymic indicated
by the British scholar to designate the husband of Marie de Meulan, “Cleuville”.
Holmes himself had noted it, but to extricate himself from the
predicament, had put forward the theory that this was Clovellie, in
Devonshire. Yet, Cleuville exists and is in upper Normandy and in the X
and XI centuries belonged to none other than the barons of Talbot. In
addition, it is worthy of note that the toponymic was used only by the
first Norman Talbots and was never in use in England during the reign of
King Henry. As attractive as the theory equating Marie di France with
Marie de Meulan may be, it is pure fantasy and it is wise to relegate the
matter to the realm of fiction, as actually occurred in a children's
novel, set in England in the XIII century, At the crossing places.
I am thus duty-bound also to reconsider the other suggestions put forward
by scholars as to the identity of Marie di France. The first part of my
book is therefore a kind of collection of archive documents the purpose of
which is to refute theories put forward over the years by people rifling
through registry archives, whether real or supposed, in search of the most
likely choice amongst the countless number of mediaeval ladies named
Marie. As if I were leading a police inquiry, I questioned the
witnesses, endeavouring to gather fresh documentary data regarding Denis
Piramus, a writer who was the same age as Marie and who expressly
mentioned Dame Marie in Vie Seint Edmund. According to the
papers surviving from Bury St Edmunds monastery where Denis spent the
latter years of his life, one can infer that Vie Seint Edmund, in
all likelihood, dates back to the period between 1173 and 1180. The
reference to the fame that Dame Marie’s Lais enjoyed
at court can therefore be dated to approximately 1175.
In 2001
Professor Antonelli, had already suggested that investigations be carried
out on the link between the Lais Prologue and the Metalogicon
(cfr. Oscurità e piacere, in Obscuritas, Retorica e poetica
dell’oscuro, Atti del XXVIII Convegno
Interuniversitario di Bressanone (12-15 July 2001),
by G. Lachin and F. Doncaster 2004). As I hope I have documented in my
book, there are many more links, which would be too complex to examine
here, for obvious reasons of space, between the author and Becket’s set,
(meaning the group of scholars gravitating around the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Thomas Becket), than those found by the editors of Marie’s
texts. In any case they had already identified the origin of one of her
fables from the episode of the matron of Ephesus related by John of
Salisbury in Policraticus. Brucker himself had noted that in the
fables prologue Marie returns to the theme of the proteiform character of
wisdom in terms which are very similar to those contained in the prologue
of the second book of the Policraticus: Several clues lead us to
associate the name of Marie with the names of authors such as John of
Salisbury, Peter of Blois, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, all writers who
belonged to an elite, male-dominated intellectual coterie and for this
reason it comes as a surprise that a lady should be, in a certain manner,
in direct contact with this court within the court. Moreover I have
attempted to document how in the Lais, allusions to actual
historical events focus on the fateful years of the intellectual struggle
as well as the struggle for power which saw Becket and his scholars
opposed to the first Plantagenet sovereign (1164-1170) and his court.
Giosuè Lachin insisted on
a kind of “genealogical anxiety” on the part of the poetess which
represents the common thread throughout her works, emphasising Marie’s
desire to become translator, or rather mouthpiece of the tradition in
respect of her new readership. Her desire to recover indigenous elements
is explicit in the Lais, but it can also be detected in the
Fables, where the poetess openly declares that she is a devotee of
Alfred, the Saxon king; this same desire can also be found in
Espurgatoire and in Vie Seinte Audree, where even though she
chooses to adapt a Latin text into Anglo-Norman, the poetess seemingly
attempts to redeem her Celtic and Saxon origins: the origins of the new
ruling class in England, meaning to say the intermingling of Bretons,
Normans and Saxons, comprising counts, barons, knights, bishops,
treasurers of the Plantagenet court, all of whom were depositories of a
heterogeneous culture for whom it was necessary to unearth new shared
roots. In this regard J. Dufournet’s considerations about Walter Map are
most interesting:
“In the same way as
Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales, Walter Map clearly represents
those writers who were half Welsh and half Norman and who had never denied
their own origins; in fact far from it, they taught their Celtic culture
to their Norman conquerors”.
Celtic culture was
therefore to form a cultural glue. The remembrance of their Celtic
origins, distinguished by cultural and linguistic features shared with
Bretons, Welsh and Irish, was an authentic source of grievance for men of
letters in Henry II’s court, committed as they were to the complex task of
establishing the origins of the Plantagenet line, dating back to Arthur,
who was descended from the Trojan heroes. Marie’s “new public” is
paradigmatically represented by those whom we could define as “new
Bretons”, in the sense of “great British Bretons”; whilst Pelagius, St
Patrick, Gildas, the shadowy Nennius, Asser and Peter Abelard, mentor of
the majority of the eruditi Thomae, were Bretons by birth, at the
Plantagenet court we find figures who were ethnically mixed, such as,
first and foremost, the ex-Chancellor of the kingdom, close friend of King
Henry II and then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, who was
culturally French (inter alia he had studied at Paris and Chartres) and
who spoke French as his first language, a second-generation Norman, but
Saxon by adoption, in the multi-ethnic Cheapside district, and who were
capable of expressing themselves in perfect English, in addition to French
and Latin.
A painstaking analysis of
the places mentioned by the author in the Lais (and I have no
evidence that such analysis has ever been thoroughly carried out) and
somewhat veiled references to ideal genealogies of people connected to the
Plantagenet court (such as the Lanvals, who - nobody had realised - were
Bretons attending the court of Henry II or the Saint-Maures, to whom the
poetess self-evidently alludes in the Yonec), would confirm, in my
opinion, the argument about Marie’s interest for genealogical matters.
La Vie Seinte Audree
therefore accords well with the educational
plan prepared by the lay-men who were also persecuted by the Becketian
coterie and about which Herbert de Bosham speaks at great length in his
Latin life of Becket, a plan to laicise ecclesiastical culture. The
readership for which Seinte Audree is intended is above all the
readership of aristocratic ladies, widows to whom it is suggested none too
subtly, that it is much better to choose a groom who cannot die
(see 1166), rather than contending with new, unwanted marriages.
What flows from the mysterious Marie’s pen is
not an essay on virginity. Ethelreda is a real feminine central character,
rather than a holy virgin prototype; she is not being persecuted by pagan
Roman emperors attempting to martyr her, but by her own husband wishing to
consume his marriage at all costs. The poem,
which unfortunately has come down to us missing the final verse, concludes
with the author’s autonominatio: Ici escris mon non Marie.
Marie de Francia’s identity, as suggested by McCash, would firstly confirm
the physical presence of the writer in England at the time when she
composed her poem. Despite the fact that on several occasions the poetess
mentions the Venerable Bede, who also wrote about Saint Etheldreda, the
material source from which Marie draws, is - as she explicitly admits -
the Vita Sanctæ Ethelredæ, written around 1174 by Thomas of Ely, a
monk from the monastery whose first abbess was none other than the saintly
Saxon. The author of the Vie Seinte Audree
demonstrates that she has a strong command of Latin and that she is
capable of adding sparkle to a narrative, which in the source version, is
often flat and dull. The incipit calls to mind other introductions to
works by Marie de France, but especially in the last part of her work, the
author of Seinte Audree proves herself to be an original writer,
undertaking an operation which cannot fail to recall the one undertaken by
the author of the Lais, in other words saving from oblivion a
number of oral narratives focusing on Ethelreda’s miracles; in addition,
the writer of the hagiographic texts demonstrates an interest which is
very similar to the one displayed by the writer of the Lais in the
original names of places and things.
As no linguistic or
stylistic analysis of the work had previously been carried out, Dominica
Legge, who wrote in the fifties, put forward an interesting theory about
the author of Vie
Seinte Audree, contending - this is my translation - "one
may legitimately speculate that there is a link between Marie and Barking
monastery”.
This theory is particularly interesting on account of its possible
repercussions. With regard to the possible connection between the author
of Vie Seinte Audree and Barking, Virginia Blanton-Whetsell, had
pointed out: “it is quite probable that the mysterious Marie comes from
Barking monastery or that her text had been copied in this convent”,
whilst Brigitte Cazelles, without providing specific explanation as to the
connection, designates the author of the Anglo-Norman Vie simply as
“Marie of Barking”.
In order to reconstruct
the provenance of the original text, written by the mysterious Marie, it
is a useful exercise to analyse the single codex which has come down to us
through the Vie Seinte Audree, the Additional 70’513. Also known
under the name of the Campsey Collection, by reason of the fact
that it comes from Campsey Priory, the Additional is a 13th
century parchment manuscript.
Both materially and
historically, four of the oldest texts contained in the Campsey collection
come from Barking abbey in Essex; seven of the thirteen poems in the work
derive from a single codex. The scribe, or the person giving instructions
as to transcription of the texts in the codex, deliberately left out
several final verses of at least four poems. In the Vie di Saint
Catherine the verses in which the writer mentions her own name,
stating that she is a nun at Barking convent are omitted,
whereas in the Parisian codex through which the same poem, has come down
to us, they are present.
In
Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence’s text,
Vie Saint Thomas le martyr de Cantorbire,
the final verses are omitted; in these verses the author thanks Thomas a
Becket’s sister who was abbess of Barking when the poem was written, for
information given to him about the famous martyr. Also the poem about the
life of Edward the Confessor,
written by an anonymous
Barking nun, suddenly stopped short at verse 4240, without the epilogue
and without the customary Amen.
Due to another surviving manuscript of the poem, kept at the Vatican
Library, we know that the Campsey Collection copyist omitted that part in
which the poetess announces that she is a nun at Barking convent as well
as the entire section relating to miracles performed by the Saint in which
Barking convent is again briefly mentioned. And then there is the
Vie seinte Audree,
(which unfortunately has
come down to us only in an edition deriving from a single source) lacking
the final verse. The
poem finishes abruptly: Mut par est fol ki se oblie.
/ Ici escris mon nom Marie / Pur ce ke soie remembree
(verses 4618-20). A
rhyme is obviously missing (remembree
appears to be suspended and
does not rhyme with anything).
What do we know about
Barking abbey?
It was a Benedictine
abbey, in Essex, very close to London, which ever since the reign of King
Stephen had enjoyed royal favours; aristocratic ladies took the veil there
and many manuscripts containing religious texts both in Latin and
Anglo-Norman, come from its library.
Being aristocratic
ladies, the Barking nuns were educated, were accustomed to Angevin court
life, and wielded power and influence in the convent: it should be
understood that the abbess of Barking enjoyed the same rights as the
nobility and held huge tracts of land in Essex. More to the point, it was
in this abbey and in the same period, towards the latter years of the XII
century, that two hagiographic writings were composed: the Vie di Saint
Catherine, written by a nun named Clemence in elegant Anglo-Norman and
demonstrating acquaintance with contemporary court literature and
terminology; and the Life of Edward the Confessor, written
anonymously, in which the poetess apologises for the poor standard of her
French (as spoken in England) and asks the
dedicatee to correct her mistakes, clarifying that the lady to whom the
work was dedicated had learnt French ailurs,
on the continent. Which leads us to assume
that it is dedicated to the abbess of the convent.
Summarizing, I have
gathered the following information relating to Barking:
1) hagiographic works
written in Anglo-Norman at this abbey commencing in the second half of the
XII century (roughly speaking between 1174 and 1180);
2) possible dedication of
the Anglo-Norman Life of Saint Edward to the abbess and the
probability that somebody, quite possibly none other than the mother
superior of the convent, ordered the poetess to compose it;
3) respects paid by a
writer of the calibre of Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence to the abbess of
Barking and her fellow nuns in 1175;
4) the fact that, in this
monastery, there was a sort of scholiast as well as someone who
was able to “correggere the faus franceis d’Angletere” of
the nuns who devoted themselves to writing;
5) probable provenance
from the same abbey as Vie Seinte Audree, written by a nun who
gives her name as Marie.
At this point, I felt
justified in wondering whether it would be rash to investigate further
within the abbey, seeking a nunnain, or still better, an abbess
named Marie.
And indeed from the
surviving papers relating to Barking abbey there is evidence that, in the
spring of 1173, two years after the assassination of archbishop Thomas à
Becket in Canterbury cathedral, Henry II, wracked with contrition and
regret (to ensure that the Pope would refrain from laying an interdict, or
even worse, excommunicating the entire country), at the instance of Odo,
prior of Canterbury, scholar and friend of Becket, elected the younger
sister of Thomas (who had just been canonized) as abbess of Barking
monastery. This lady was called Marie. Her appointment as abbess of
the most influential women’s monastery in the kingdom was recorded by many
contemporary observers.
Who was Marie Becket at the time of her appointment as abbess? A mature
lady, in accordance with contemporary criteria, having been born around
1125-30 (a period which would reconcile with the presumed date of birth of
the poet bearing the same name); a widow, and mother of at least two
children.
The fact that a man of the intellectual
calibre of prior Odo of Canterbury (referred to by John of Salisbury, in
Entheticus (1675-81) as “Odonis ex aurea lingua”) actively
encouraged the king (with whom, it may be noted, he had a conflicting
relationship) to appoint Becket’s sister as abbess of Barking, may be
indicative of the high esteem in which he held this lady. I find it
interesting to note how amongst those witnessing the surviving document
appointing Marie as abbess of Barking, there is Earl William of
Mandeville, on whose land, in Essex, the abbey stood, and who Axel Ahlström,
and then Sidney Painter,
suggested was the dedicatee of the Fables.
We
even possess a document about the place where abbess Marie was buried, in
which it expressly states that “Dame Marie, this is how she is
referred to in the document, lies in the stone coffin in front of the
altar”.
Before
becoming the sister of a holy martyr, or more precisely the holy martyr
par excellence of the English Church, Marie was the sister of the elegant,
ambitious, scholarly chancellor of Henry II’s kingdom who also happened to
be the close friend of the Plantagenet sovereign, a condition which
certainly brought her into close contact with that circle of savants who
gravitated around the future English primate.
To date, the
question as to how a writer describing herself as “de France” was able to
translate from the English native tongue, remains without an answer,
unless her declaration (only in the Fables) that she belonged to“la
douce France”, should be read as a sort of posture d’auteur,
explained by biographical and ideological factors, because Marie does not
speak about her birth on French soil, rather she claims to be culturally
and sentimentally part of that “terra franca”, which as Garnier of
Pont-Sainte-Maxence, states on the matter of Thomas a Becket’s exile,
offered sanctuary to all those seeking refuge. For the Becketian circle in
exile, France represents what sociologists would define an ideologem of
identity and, in the final analysis, with regard to that country,
Marie could have harboured a sentiment which is similar to the attachment
felt by John of Salisbury and Herbert of Boshham (refer to my book for the
related discussion).
The purpose of my study
(summarised here somewhat tersely and to which I therefore suggest
reference be made for further information) is not to undermine Marie de
France’s anonymity, at all costs, and in the process provide critics with
a new theory about the poetess’s biography. Dame Marie, the sister
of Thomas a Becket, grew up in a Norman family in which Gilbert, the head
of the family, was as the Becketian Latin lives emphasises,
constantly in close contact with the secular elite of Norman origin, and
she spent seven years in exile in France; were it possible to establish
that she and Marie de France were one and the same person, the reason for
her sense of attachment would be much clearer. But surprisingly, possible
confirmation of the theory that Marie Becket and Marie de France were the
same person, could come, most convincingly, from an analysis of the two
handwritten codices which have come down to us through the best-known
works of the poetess: the BL Harley 978 codex and the Cotton Vespasianus B
XIV (as documented in my book published by Bagatto).
Perhaps new avenues of
research are opening up for philologists in our field, ones authorised by
the poetess herself: Pur ceus ki a venir esteient / E ki aprendre les
deveient, / Ki peussent gloser la lettre / E de lur sen le surplus mettre.
For example, if on the one hand we are in a position to appreciate the
reasons why Marie’s freedom of expression diminished over time on account
of the increasingly strained relations between the court chancellor (later
to become a troublesome archbishop) and the Plantagenet King, we could, on
the other hand, investigate the relations which the poetess forged with
the Cistercian milieu in view of the support given to the Becket family in
exile specifically by the white monks.
We could better investigate the influence wielded by Dame Marie
over the two Barking nuns, writers of two hagiographic Anglo-Norman poems,
and over Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence; but, more to the point we could
act with greater conviction as to the accumulation implemented by Marie
and the adaptation by this erudite lady into the vernacular of certain
themes which were dear to the “beati Thomae” scholars; her life and
literary career, were tragically marked by the death of her brother, and
she was to spend the last years of her life within the walls of a convent:
a lady whose spiritual and cultural guide could not fail to be, inter alia,
the abbess of Paraclete.
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