Fables
Along with her lais, Marie de France also published a large collection of fables. Many of the fables she wrote were translations of Aesop’s fables into English and others can be traced to more regional sources, fables to which Marie would have been exposed at a young age. Among her 102 fables, there are no concrete guidelines for morality; and men, women, and animals receive varying treatments and punishments.
Marie de France introduces her fables in the form of a prologue, where she explains the importance of moral instruction in society. In the first section of the prologue, she discusses the medieval ideal of "clergie". Clergie is the notion that people have a duty to understand, learn, and preserve works of the past for future peoples. Here, in the prologue, she is referencing the duty of scholars to preserve moral philosophy and proverbs. The rest of Marie de France’s prologue outlines how Aesop took up this duty for his society and how she must now preserve his fables and others for her present culture.
Structurally, each of the fables begins with the recounting of a tale, and at the end Marie de France includes a short moral. Some of these morals, like those translated from Aesop’s fables, are expected and socially congruous. For instance, the fable of The Wolf and the Lamb, also known as Fable 2 in Marie’s collection, follows a well-known and established storyline. Just as in Aesop’s original fable, Marie de France’s translation describes a lamb and a wolf drinking from the same stream, the wolf unjustly condemning the lamb to death for drinking inoffensively downstream from him. Marie de France repeats the established moral at the end, "But these are things rich nobles do…destroy folk with false evidence".
However, in the new fables, featuring human female characters, Marie de France asserts female power and cunning, disparaging men who are ignorant or behave foolishly. One character, a peasant woman, makes multiple appearances in the fables and is praised for her shrewd and sly ways. Fables 44, The Woman Who Tricked Her Husband and 45, A Second Time, a Woman Tricks Her Husband, both recount tales of the same peasant woman successfully carrying out an affair despite her husband having caught her with her lover both times. In the first fable, the peasant woman convinces her husband that her lover was merely a trick of the eye and in the second, persuades her husband that he has had a vision of her and a man, foreshadowing her death. Marie lauds the woman for her crafty ways and faults the peasant husband with idiocy. The morality, or lack thereof, in these two female-centered fables is interesting and takes root in the tradition of "wife tricking her husband" stories, such as The Merchant’s Tale and Scots-Irish tradition.
Fable 51, Del cok e del gupil ("Concerning the Cock and the Fox"), is considered an early version of the Reynard the Fox tales, and was an inspiration for Geoffrey Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale.
According to the epilogue of the Fables, they are translated from an English version by Alfred the Great.
