Representations of love in Breton Lais and Lais of Marie de France

Abstract

Love is an essential theme in Middle Age French literature being the genre lai one of the main ones in the form of a short rhymed or narrated verse. This paper seeks to investigate the representations of female love in the Middle Ages portrayed in twenty-three lais found in the works Breton Lais (2013) and Lais de Marie de France (2001) and understand if such representations suggest some way of living and loving in our contemporary society. Jodelet´s Objectification and Anchoring systems (1984), from Sociology, and the concept of Love-Passion (1988), by the cultural writer and theorist Rougemont, are used as support for the analyses. The paper questions the extension these representations have influenced our Western imagination about love relationships and provided, for generations of readers, stereotypes about French culture that exist to the present day. It turns out that different representations of the analyzed lais give rise to several déjà vu in our current society on the subject in question. The representations of love are built with geographical spaces, in a French and English Britains as well as in non-defined spaces. The profile of women is presented by a positive lexical field and the love relationships aroused in the analyzed lais are love punishments of the time.