Naming with Many Names: Reimagining Origins in Marie de France’s Lais

Abstract

This essay explores how acts of naming and designation determine identities in Marie de France’s twelfth-century Lais. An artifact of the tangled cultural politics of the Angevin court in England, the Breton lai embodies a multiplicity of claims: it is a form preserved in Brittany, derived from Welsh narratives, yet rewritten presumably in England in Marie’s Île-de-France French for an audience that primarily spoke Anglo-Norman. I argue that Marie’s position at the nexus of several vernaculars reveals itself in a concern with grammatical categories and linguistic derivation. By investigating the varied circumstances under which names are lost, recovered, borrowed, and transformed, Marie undercuts traditional models of familial and literary inheritance, furnishing her Anglo-Norman readers with a narrative of cultural continuity that validates their claims to status in the insular territories.