TY - JOUR
T1 - A medieval woman dares to stand Up
T2 - Marie de France's Criticism of the king and the court
AU - Classen, Albrecht
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact [email protected].
PY - 2020/3
Y1 - 2020/3
N2 - While medievalists have long recognized Marie de France's extraordinary literary abilities, we have not yet fully identified the extent to which she stood up as a social critic who attacked many social ills within her society, not holding back in her sharp attacks both against the figure of the king and against the powerful nobles of her time. Only if we combine her lais and her fables in our analysis, can we gain a full understanding of the far-reaching discourse about the danger of abuse of power at the hand of the mighty and rich in the high Middle Ages. Although we tend to identify that past era as deeply remote from us, as repressive, simple-minded, and submissive, Marie's strong criticism of the abuses by the high-ranking contemporaries sheds important light on a world that was not really that far away from us in many different ways, with many intellectuals already extensively aware about social injustice and the danger of tyranny.
AB - While medievalists have long recognized Marie de France's extraordinary literary abilities, we have not yet fully identified the extent to which she stood up as a social critic who attacked many social ills within her society, not holding back in her sharp attacks both against the figure of the king and against the powerful nobles of her time. Only if we combine her lais and her fables in our analysis, can we gain a full understanding of the far-reaching discourse about the danger of abuse of power at the hand of the mighty and rich in the high Middle Ages. Although we tend to identify that past era as deeply remote from us, as repressive, simple-minded, and submissive, Marie's strong criticism of the abuses by the high-ranking contemporaries sheds important light on a world that was not really that far away from us in many different ways, with many intellectuals already extensively aware about social injustice and the danger of tyranny.
KW - Court criticism
KW - Criticism of the king
KW - Fables
KW - Lais
KW - Marie de France
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U2 - 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.01
DO - 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.01
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85091487092
SN - 0975-2935
VL - 12
SP - 1
EP - 13
JO - Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
JF - Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
IS - 2
ER -