Marie de France

Marie de France,
12th‐century French poet. The first known European woman writer to compose vernacular narrative poetry, Marie was best known for her Aesop‐based Fables and her twelve widely translated Lais (c.1160–1215). Short verse romances, the Lais are sophisticated retellings of traditional Breton oral lais. In several, the supernatural plays a key role: ‘Lanval’, a fairy bride story whose hero is one of Arthur's knights; ‘Bisclavret’, the story of a virtuous werewolf; and ‘Yonec’, an animal‐groom tale whose captive heroine is visited by a lover in the form of a hawk.

Suzanne Rahn