The Arthurian legendary tradition overlapped with the genre of chivalric romance and its popular courtly love themes. Some stories focus on King Arthur’s court, Camelot, and his fellowship of knights known as the Round Table, while others focus on his knights’ quests, most famously the quest for the Holy Grail. King Arthur, the possibly ahistorical King of Britain in the fifth or sixth century, is the story collection’s central figure. A key text in the Matter of Britain was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae, which drew on many ancient British writings. Marie de France was likely influenced by a collection of medieval literary and legendary material known as the Matter of Britain. Besides authoring the Lais and some saints’ lives, Marie also translated Aesop’s Fables from Middle English to Anglo-Norman. She was educated: she wrote in Anglo-Norman and was apparently familiar with Latin, Middle English, and Breton (a Celtic language spoken in France’s northwest peninsula), because Breton lais, or lays (short, rhyming tales), were the basis for the Anglo-Norman verse narratives that became known as The Lais of Marie de France. Others have speculated that she was an abbess somewhere in England.) Scholars have also identified her as the first woman to author verse in French. (In fact, some have speculated that she was King Henry’s sister-but given that the name “Marie” was so common, it’s almost impossible to know for sure. Though apparently born in France, she lived in England and probably lived and wrote in a royal court, but which one is uncertain-possibly King Henry II’s and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine’s (reigning in the late 12th and early 13th centuries). Besides calling herself “Marie” in her manuscripts, the author reveals nothing else about herself. In one of her works, she refers to herself as “Marie from France,” and that’s how scholars and readers have identified her ever since.
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