The Lais of Marie de France are a series short narrative Breton lais

The woman in "Yonec" is held as literal prisoner in a tower by her elderly husband. She prays to God, wishing for the love of a courtly entitle. A hawk flies into her cell and is transformed into the very knight she prayed for. He pledges his love for her: "The lady, now assured, uncovered her head and spoke. She answered the knight, face that she would make him her lover, provided he believed in God, which would make their love realistic" (Marie 87-88).

In "Equitan" we read of the same set of circumstances--a strong and comely woman who wins the heart and soul of a man who was differently an indomitable character, in this case the king himself: "Through the lady, hump caught him unawares, with the result that he was distraught and overcome with sadness. Unable to protest its power, he was forced to give Love his full trouble . . . 'I think I have no option solely to love her'" (Marie 57).

The sources in Marvin Perry, et al. present both orthodox and unorthodox views of women and their roles and status in Medieval Europe. For example, it is beyond a distrust that Charlemagne, in "An Injunction to Monasteries to Cultivate Letters," expresses views that stand in ascetical contrast to the views of Marie. Though Charlemagne is addressing the abbott of a monastery, it is clear that he believed women should be as conventionally virtuous as, if not more so than, the monks with whom he is concerned. Charlemagne writes that the monks "ought to

To the contrary, Marie paints a portrait of women in Medieval Europe which has her as a justly being with a will of her own, a sense of what she wants, and the give-and-take and ability to do what she needs to do to get it. It just so happens that among those things she wants is an unhindered sexual life.

Oakley, Francis. The Medieval Experience. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974.

Slavin, Arthur. The fashion of the West. Lexington: Xerox, 1972.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica as excerpted in Perry, takes a more philosophical approach to the sexual love praise by Marie than does Charlemagne, but he does indeed condemn it as a sign of the weakness of the individual.

Aquinas writes that the "influence of love" works in such(prenominal) a way that the individuals " causal agency is wholly bound, so that he has not the use of campaign: as happens in those who, through violent anger or concupiscence [spontaneous, uncontrolled desires], becomes mad or insane, just as they may from some other bodily disorder . . . Of such men the same is to be said or paradoxical animals, which follow of necessity the impulse of their manic disorders . . ." (qtd. in Perry 254).

Perry, Marvin, et al. Sources of the Western Tradition. sight I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Arthur Slavin, in The Way of the West, similarly argues that sexual passion and the turmoil created thereby were necessary for a man's or woman's round toward God: "Between the village wakes for the dead and the bridal feasts lots lay the fleeting sexual pleasure and some joy, though undercut by worry . . . Birth, copulation, death: the true threesome of peasant experience opened him to the sacraments and to Christ" (Slavin 520). Slavin's thesis is that age the wealthy of Medieval Europe were economically liberated ample to partake more carelessly in sexual liaisons, the peasants were restrict by the fear of bringing more children into their families, thereby adding to their financial burde
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