Marie de France in motion

Although Marie de France’s Ysopet (or Fables) survives in a remarkable 25 manuscript witnesses, several of which are complete, every edition of the collection published since 1898 has been grounded in the text of British Library, MS Harley 978 (A). The consensus on the primacy of A reflects an understandable desire to approximate Marie’s original vision and voice as closely as possible. But what of the other witnesses, some of which reflect the form taken by the text when it was at its most popular? Do their Ysopet versions conform to the scholarly understanding that has crystallised through generations of modern critical readings grounded in the poetics of A — and if not, what can we learn from their differences?

This article proposes that stepping beyond the frame of the A version can enable progress to be made on the question of Marie’s gendered authorial voice and how it relates to the narrative representation of gender in this collection. By closely examining three fables with important implications for dynamics of gender and putting their most significant variations into dialogue with the text of Warnke’s edition based on A, I argue that the place of gender within the Ysopet is precisely that it has no single place; rather, it could emerge in distinctive configurations of meaning from one manuscript witness to the next, testifying to a process of continual questioning and reinterpretation on the part of the scribes into whose hands Marie’s work fell.