This rich, erudite, and innovative book is a major contribution to the field, not only for scholars of Marie de France, but for those interested in the interactions between Arab cultural tradition (and even a more largely "oriental" tradition, including Indian sources) and Western European culture. The reader might sense that Sahar Amer has an enormous task: valorizing Arab literary tradition in the face of a field that has largely ignored that tradition, and valorizing Marie's complex and subtle writing in the face of critics who have denied the significance of the Esope for the establishment of the fable as a genre of writing independent of the realm of didactic rhetoric (theological and legal). Primacy has always been given to La Fontaine in that regard; yet his fables are more firmly rooted in the didactic Latin tradition delineated by Amer than are Marie's more problematizing versions. In fact, Marie's legacy is more immediately evident in the sometimes strange morals appended to fairy tales, such as those of Perrault, which also offer a more complex and subtle narrative than that of the Roman fable tradition.
Amer sets the stage with a careful and thorough presentation of historical background, establishing circumstantial evidence of the connections between Arab fable tradition, the Kalilah wa Dimnah in particular, and the Esope. This evidence is intriguing, and important for an understanding of the argument to follow, but not fully satisfying. One senses that the author may be battling a long critical tradition that resists these connections; at times, this study seems to "protest too much". But it is in its brilliant and subtle analysis of the texts themselves, particularly the Esope, that this study wins the reader over. Several points stand out: the demonstration of a revised pedagogy in the Esope, one closely related to the style of the Kalilah wa Dimnah, which complicates the simple and supposedly universal lessons of the Latin tradition; the suggestion of an ethical relativism that questions this very universality; and the elaboration of a very different relationship between author and reader than that posited by the Latin fable tradition. Amer indicates a disjunction between the situations described in the fables, and their morals, as well as disjunctions between the various fables, which seem to revise each other; these disjunctions suggest that each situation requires a different approach, and that a universalizing moral is inappropriate. This problematic relationship between the details of the story and the moral, and among all of the stories, blurs the distinction between author as pedagogical master and reader as ignorant disciple. The reader becomes a participant in the fluid process of narrative production, creating connections among the various stories, and sorting out the lessons to be learned. Interestingly, these elements are also characteristic of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, a fact which suggests a larger potential scope for this study, that of women's writing, particularly in the genre of the short story (nouvelle or fairy tale), which has a long tradition beginning with Marie.
Finally, this book offers a reading of the feminine voice in the Esope, one that demonstrates the strong presence of the authorial persona. It is suggestive that, while Marie absorbs alterity into the very style and structure of her writing, she maintains a very strong presentation of the self (potentially as other, that is, as a woman). The very presence and valorization of alterity seems to give Marie power to speak as a woman; this, as Amer points out, in spite of the misogyny that predominates in Western and Arab culture alike. There is something in the Arab fable tradition, a sort of scepticism, that allows for subversion of these repressive, and universalizing, attitudes.
This is one of only a few books on Marie's work that I would unhesitatingly recommend to my students of Old French literature and of women's writing. Sahar Amer has, while writing an important study of Marie de France's work, pointed the way to further study of the place of Arab traditions in western culture, and shown us how this study might enrich our understanding of western literature. I look forward to more work from this author.