Marie de France\u27s Courtly Love: The Liberation of Women Through Romance

In the era of ladies and lords, French troubadours sang the tales of the late twelfth-century medieval court. One such poet, Marie de France, documented her stories in her work, Lais, a collection of adulterous romantic feats and failures of chivalrous knights. Within her writing, she incorporated aspects of the knight’s code of honor into the personalities of her characters. While the knightly code of honor is often perceived as an example of the restrictions placed on medieval women, Marie de France’s writing gives an example of women reconstructing their position in medieval life. This paper explores the tales of Marie de France to argue the influence of the knightly code of honor on the empowerment of women through court romance