Abstract
Within the general pattern of multiples that map out a potential for intertextual play in the Lais, Marie de France introduces a more specific design, the twins who appear in Le Fresne both literally and figuratively. Their presence in the collection invites us to consider how different models of twinning may shape and give new meaning to the larger pattern of multiplication. To illustrate, I offer here a twostaged reading of Le Fresne's twins, each part twinned with another lay in the collection, in the first case, Lanval, in the second, Chievrefoil.1 The division in two parts corresponds to differing views of twins in the human imagination, seen as duality (a competition of opposites) on the one hand, and dualism (or complementarity to form a whole), on the other.2 These two views suggest the mind at work making sense of twins as a puzzle or contradiction: they are two and yet a unit, the same and its other.
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