Edited by Jeanne-Marie Boivin and Baptiste Laïd, Marie de France fabuliste is a carefully curated collection of fourteen essays (plus introduction) resulting from a 2021 colloquium at the Université Paris-Est Créteil. The volume takes its subtitle from Marie’s Fable 45, a nod to the subversive potential of the poet’s art. This work reflects a larger resurgence of interest in Marie’s fables, alongside Laïd’sL’élaboration du recueil des fables de Marie de France (Champion, 2020), François Morvan’s 2022 modern French translation (Actes du Sud), and a forthcoming edition/translation, again, from Laïd and Champion. In this context, Marie de France fabuliste is both timely and strategic, with the editors expressing an explicit desire that “le XXIe siècle rendra aux Fables de Marie de France la place qui était la leur au Moyen Age” (15).
The essays are organized into three thematic sections, ranging from broad literary analysis to more technical philological studies. This structure is highly effective and unusually readable for a collected volume. Though many scholars will pick and choose chapters relevant to their own work, the way the articles dovetail into one another encourages and rewards cover-to-cover reading. That said, although the editors frame the volume as suitable for both students and specialists, the final two sections become progressively more scholarly and may prove challenging for non-specialist readers.
The first part, the most accessible and pedagogically useful, concerns Marie’s techniques and innovations. Caterina Mordeglia’s opening essay reexamines Marie de France’s Latin sources, challenging the traditional view of Marie as a reworker of the medieval Romulus tradition. By drawing comparisons instead with the broader Phaedrus tradition, Mordeglia offers a counterweight to dominant models of textual transmission. She concludes that Marie’s sources are not reducible to a single fable compilation but rather reflect the fluidity of the Phaedrian tradition and Marie’s place as an innovator within it. Building on this engagement with antiquity, Baptiste Laïd follows with a compelling study of Marie’s innovative “art de la morale” (46). Unlike her Latin sources, Marie frequently relocates the moral to the end of the fable and reshapes it through echoic vocabulary and rhetorical parallelism. At times, the moral diverges significantly from the original, a shift Laïd reads as intentional authorial commentary. As in his earlier-mentioned monograph, Laïd shines brightly in his intertwined close readings of the fables, once again demonstrating an enviable intimacy with the source material.
In her chapter, Tovi Bibring explores depictions of the vilain, drawing attention to questions of sexuality, gender, and embodiment. Moreover, she adds sharp observations into Marie’s treatment of Eve and original sin, extending arguments from her earlier scholarship. I found Bibring’s inclusion of a comprehensive list of human types in the Fables to be particularly helpful. Taking up Bibring’s brush with humor, Nicolas Garnier’s essay examines Marie’s comic sensibility more pointedly. He contrasts Marie’s use of humor with near-contemporary fabliaux, highlighting her strategic employment of euphemism and lexical incongruity (incongruité lexicale) to temper “spicier” themes. Garnier argues that, unlike the bawdy fabliaux, Marie’s humor is more subtle and fanciful (what he calls a “rire fantaisiste,” 71) and balances levity with courtly decorum. The first part concludes with a long essay by Christopher Lucken that reevaluates the oft-repeated claim of Marie’s conservatism. After an extended survey of the relevant scholarship, in both French and in English, he redefines “conservatism” as medieval social cohesion, highlighting Marie’s concern with communal order rather than rigid hierarchy. His reading of Fable 27 (“The Members of the Body”) is especially memorable, showing how Marie departs from the antique model of the Republic to a modified vision of communal interdependence.
The second section, devoted to transmission, is shorter and more material in nature. Jeanne-Marie Boivin’s article on illustrated manuscripts is a standout, introducing a refreshing visual element into an otherwise text-focused volume though, unfortunately, the print format disrupts the ease of reference. Twenty-eight black and white plates are grouped midway through the book rather than embedded contextually within the article. This requires the reader to flip back and forth frequently to see the fascinating comparisons; and in some cases, the mentioned images are sadly not included. Still, the treatment of text-image, whether compared with other manuscripts or other fable collections altogether, is welcome. Marie-Madeleine Huchet provides a thorough study of ms. M (Paris, BNF fr. 1822) and its likely scribe, Servais Copale, whose Walloon background may have influenced the particular flavor ofmouvance seen in the manuscript. Huchet’s analysis of the graphemic and morphological shifts is impressive. Notably, she compares Servais’s scribal practices with the nineteenth-century editorial processes of Karl Warnke, offering a strong philological argument that the manuscript, while unsuited as a control for transcription, deserves renewed attention for what it reveals about scribal reception.
Valentina Piro’s English-language essay compares Marie’s fables with those of Odo of Cheriton. The techniques shared by Marie and Odo, particularly the shift from ethical to social didacticism, are convincingly drawn. To close out the second grouping, Paola Cifarelli surveys Italian translations and reception from the fifteenth century, identifying a late medieval audience of bourgeois lay readers, likely copying for pleasure. Her discussion of terminology surrounding the fables (e.g., conto, essemplo) and the material placement of the fables alongside vernacular classics such as the Decameron opens useful questions about genre and transmission.
The final section is the most specialized in scope. Sylvie Lefèvre revisits the nineteenth-century transference of the likely forged “la mort et la bosquillon” to Marie de France via the notorious Clotilde de Surville. Lefèvre’s bibliographic tracking of this false attribution, despite early rejection by de Roquefort, is both amusing and revealing, and is striking in its implications for nineteenth-century constructions (or perhaps fabrications) of women’s authorship. Joana Casenave provides a dense overview of the reception of the Fables in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by cataloguing university seminars, editions, anthologies, and school curricula. Particularly delightful is the revelation of nineteenth-century prompts for the brevet and baccalauréat, situating Marie alongside La Fontaine. Casenave includes insightful data on Marie’s early anthologization and readership trends, with several tables showing publication records and selected fable distribution within edited collections.
The last three essays deal with specific treatments of the source material, of which the first two will appeal to specialists interested in the history of editions. Françoise Vielliard evaluates B. de Roquefort’s 1820 edition, noting its obscure manuscript base and its largely overlooked role in the history of Marie’s editorial tradition. Richard Trachsler follows with a meticulous analysis of Karl Warnke’s stemmatic logic, focusing on Warnke’s almost obsessive attempts to resurrect Marie’s Francien. Trachsler also offers an enticing path through more recent, unpublished editorial work by Mohan Halgrain that leaves the reader wanting more. Finally, Françoise Morvan offers a personal reflection on her own relationship with Marie’sFables, framing her recent translation as both a literary and political endeavor, thus bringing the reader back to the accessibility of the genre following a full suite of rigorous essays rooted in philological scholarship.
Footnotes throughout the volume are incredibly detailed with rich bibliographic citation, though the lack of a consolidated bibliography is regrettable. Indices are minimal: an index of cited authors and a concordance of fable numbers keyed to Charles Brucker’s edition (Peeters, 1998). Given how well-organized and thematically integrated the essays are, it is somewhat surprising that the contributions do not more explicitly reference one another. Often, a point raised in one chapter reemerges in another, but without cross-reference or acknowledgment. Some light intravolume citation would have enhanced the reading experience, particularly for those consulting individual chapters. Still, this absence may be due to the volume’s origins in a colloquium; the immediacy of live exchange is difficult to reproduce in print.
Overall, Marie de France fabuliste is a cohesive and carefully structured collection of essays, balancing broad literary questions with detailed textual and editorial analysis that will appeal to a wide range of scholars. While the linguistic range demands a great deal of its reader--one will need to brush up on Old French, modern French, Latin, Italian, German, and/or English--the volume rewards the effort. In scope and design, it succeeds not only in deepening our understanding of Marie’s fables but also in reasserting their deserved place within the field.