Marie de France

Marie de France was a poet of the later twelfth century, probably born in France, who lived and wrote in England and whose work was almost certainly known at the court of Henry II. Almost nothing is known of her life, and even her name comes from a line in her own poetry, in which she says that her name is Marie and that she is from France. Scholars regard her as the first known woman to write verse in French, and she wrote in Old French, possibly in its Anglo-Norman variety. She is chiefly remembered for the Lais, a collection of twelve short narrative poems, mostly of a few hundred lines each, which she says she took from the tales of Breton minstrels. Works attributed to her also include a collection of about one hundred Ysopet fables adapted from the tradition of Aesop, and a verse retelling of the Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick. Her Lais were widely read and shaped the later development of medieval romance.