"The dead and past stories that I have told again in divers fashions, are not set down without authority"
About this Quote
Medieval storytellers didn’t get to be “original” in the modern, precious sense; they got to be credible. Marie de France opens with a small act of self-defense that doubles as a power play: these “dead and past stories,” retold “in divers fashions,” aren’t idle entertainment or courtly gossip. They come with “authority.” In a culture where a tale’s legitimacy depended on lineage - who heard it, who carried it, what language it traveled in - Marie is staking a claim to the chain of transmission. She’s not inventing; she’s inheriting, translating, refining. That’s her license to speak.
The phrasing matters. “Dead and past” implies distance, even decay; stories risk becoming inert relics unless someone reanimates them. By admitting she has told them “again” and in multiple versions, she acknowledges the mutability of narrative while refusing the accusation that variation equals falsification. The subtext is a rebuttal to the medieval suspicion of embellishment: yes, I reshape, but I do not counterfeit.
Context sharpens the edge. As a woman writing in Anglo-Norman French, Marie operates in a literary world that treats authority as masculine, clerical, Latin, and institutional. She can’t lean on university credentials or ecclesiastical office, so she leans on sources and tradition - the socially acceptable scaffolding for a voice like hers. “Not set down without authority” is less a footnote than a declaration of belonging: I have the right to record, to interpret, and to make the old speak in a new register.
The phrasing matters. “Dead and past” implies distance, even decay; stories risk becoming inert relics unless someone reanimates them. By admitting she has told them “again” and in multiple versions, she acknowledges the mutability of narrative while refusing the accusation that variation equals falsification. The subtext is a rebuttal to the medieval suspicion of embellishment: yes, I reshape, but I do not counterfeit.
Context sharpens the edge. As a woman writing in Anglo-Norman French, Marie operates in a literary world that treats authority as masculine, clerical, Latin, and institutional. She can’t lean on university credentials or ecclesiastical office, so she leans on sources and tradition - the socially acceptable scaffolding for a voice like hers. “Not set down without authority” is less a footnote than a declaration of belonging: I have the right to record, to interpret, and to make the old speak in a new register.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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