"Great were the lamentation and the cry when the news of this mischance was noised about the city. Such a tumult of mourning was never before heard, for the whole city was moved"
About this Quote
Grief here isn’t private; it’s infrastructural. Marie de France stages mourning as a civic event, a sound that travels, swells, and recruits an entire city into feeling. The phrasing is almost administrative in its sweep: “noised about the city” makes tragedy read like news, rumor, and public record at once. What’s being reported isn’t simply a “mischance” but the social aftershock - the way loss becomes contagious when a community is tightly wired by gossip, obligation, and shared spectacle.
Marie’s insistence on scale (“never before heard,” “the whole city”) does more than heighten drama. It flatters the importance of the story’s central figures, implying that certain lives are so entangled with public identity that their misfortune cannot remain personal. In a courtly world where status is performed and reputation circulates, collective lamentation becomes a kind of proof: the louder the cry, the more legitimate the sorrow, the more consequential the fall.
There’s subtext, too, in the almost theatrical acoustics. The city “was moved” less by intimate knowledge than by the choreography of reaction - a medieval version of going viral. Marie, writing for aristocratic audiences attuned to honor and public emotion, uses mass mourning to ratify the moral stakes of the narrative. The grief is real, but it’s also a social technology: it binds the crowd, marks the event as history, and turns mischance into meaning by making everyone, willingly or not, a witness.
Marie’s insistence on scale (“never before heard,” “the whole city”) does more than heighten drama. It flatters the importance of the story’s central figures, implying that certain lives are so entangled with public identity that their misfortune cannot remain personal. In a courtly world where status is performed and reputation circulates, collective lamentation becomes a kind of proof: the louder the cry, the more legitimate the sorrow, the more consequential the fall.
There’s subtext, too, in the almost theatrical acoustics. The city “was moved” less by intimate knowledge than by the choreography of reaction - a medieval version of going viral. Marie, writing for aristocratic audiences attuned to honor and public emotion, uses mass mourning to ratify the moral stakes of the narrative. The grief is real, but it’s also a social technology: it binds the crowd, marks the event as history, and turns mischance into meaning by making everyone, willingly or not, a witness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sadness |
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