A Tale of Courtly Romance

Welcome to Etcha. I’m Ben, and today we are going to answer the question, “How can you tell if you are in a courtly romance?”

Here is how I imagined things went in the twelfth century: between the arduous duties of counting coppers, attending tournaments, waging wars, and beheading criminals, the Lords and Ladies and other various courtiers would lounge about their court regaling each other with tales of love, romance, danger, and daring. And among these esteemed storytellers was a woman named Marie de France, the first woman of her time to have written successfully in the vernacular.

Now who exactly Marie de France was is up for debate. Was she Marie, the eighth Norman child of Waleran de Muelan? Marie, abbess of Shaftsbury? Mary, abbess of Reading?

Whomever she was, this woman brought us one of the most esteemed collections of courtly romances of the early Medieval ages, The Lais of Marie de France.

Twelve stories grace this collection, but what better story to answer our question of Courtly Love than the story of a knight in King Arthur’s court?

To hear the story of Lanval, click the link above.