Marie de France

Marie de France is a name and nothing more: a woman writing in French in England in the late twelfth century, perhaps at the court of Henry II, perhaps an abbess, who says only that she is Marie and from France. The Lais are twelve short narrative poems on love, from the Breton stories, she says, that she had heard sung: a werewolf betrayed by his wife, a knight and a lady who can be together only as a hawk, two lovers who die climbing a mountain. She also wrote fables and a Purgatory of St Patrick, and she is the first woman poet in French.