"For above all things Love means sweetness, and truth, and measure; yea, loyalty to the loved one and to your word. And because of this I dare not meddle with so high a matter"
About this Quote
Love is framed here less as a rush of feeling than as a code of conduct, and that choice tells you what kind of poet Marie de France is. She anchors the highest emotion in oddly disciplined nouns: sweetness, truth, measure, loyalty. “Measure” does quiet but crucial work. It’s the medieval virtue of restraint, proportion, knowing the limits of desire so it doesn’t curdle into possession or spectacle. In a courtly culture that loved to glamorize passion, Marie insists that real love is legible in behavior: how you speak, what you keep, what you refuse.
The subtext is a rhetorical feint: she lists love’s requirements so vividly that she’s already “meddling,” then claims she won’t. That modesty isn’t just piety; it’s strategy. As a woman writing in a milieu where public authority skewed male and moralizing could be punished as presumption, she gains permission by bowing. “I dare not” signals humility while also sharpening the stakes: if love demands truth and loyalty to “your word,” then poems - made of words - become ethical acts. Speech can honor love or betray it.
Contextually, this fits Marie’s broader project in the lais: staging desire in a social world of oaths, secrecy, and reputation. Love isn’t purely private; it has contractual gravity. Her restraint is not prudishness but a warning: treat love lightly and you expose yourself as someone without measure, unfit for the very sweetness you claim to seek.
The subtext is a rhetorical feint: she lists love’s requirements so vividly that she’s already “meddling,” then claims she won’t. That modesty isn’t just piety; it’s strategy. As a woman writing in a milieu where public authority skewed male and moralizing could be punished as presumption, she gains permission by bowing. “I dare not” signals humility while also sharpening the stakes: if love demands truth and loyalty to “your word,” then poems - made of words - become ethical acts. Speech can honor love or betray it.
Contextually, this fits Marie’s broader project in the lais: staging desire in a social world of oaths, secrecy, and reputation. Love isn’t purely private; it has contractual gravity. Her restraint is not prudishness but a warning: treat love lightly and you expose yourself as someone without measure, unfit for the very sweetness you claim to seek.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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