Editing Marie de France (section)

===Defying church traditions===
Marie de France's lais not only portray a gloomy outlook on love but also defied the traditions of love within the church at the time. She wrote about adulterous affairs, women of high stature who seduce other men, and women seeking escape from a loveless marriage, often to an older man, which gave the idea that women can have sexual freedom. She wrote lais, many of which seemed to endorse sentiments that were contrary to the traditions of the church, especially the idea of virginal love and marriage.

The lais also exhibit the idea of a stronger female role and power. In this, she may have inherited ideas and norms from the troubadour love songs that were common at the Angevin courts of England, Aquitaine, Anjou and Brittany; songs in which the heroine "is a contradictory symbol of power and inarticulacy; she is at once acutely vulnerable and emotionally overwhelming, irrelevant and central."<ref>Butterfield, Ardis, 2009, p&nbsp;200.</ref> Marie's heroines are often the instigators of events, but events that often end in suffering.

The heroines in Marie's ''Lais'' are often imprisoned. This imprisonment may take the form of actual incarceration by elderly husbands, as in ''Yonec'', and in ''Guigemar'', where the lady who becomes Guigemar's lover is kept behind the walls of a castle which faces the sea, or "merely of close surveillance, as in ''Laustic'', where the husband, who keeps a close watch on his wife when he is present, has her watched equally closely when he is away from home."<ref>Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr., p&nbsp;58.</ref> Perhaps it reflects some experience within her own life.<ref name="BurgessBusby" /> The willingness to endorse such thoughts as adultery in the 12th century is perhaps remarkable. "It certainly reminds us that people in the Middle Ages were aware of social injustices and did not just accept oppressive conditions as inevitable by the will of God."<ref>Steinberg, Theodore L. Reading the Middle Ages: an Introduction to Medieval Literature.Jefferson: McFarland, 2003. Print, p&nbsp;58.</ref>

In addition to her defying the construct of love exhibited by the contemporary church, Marie also influenced a genre that continued to be popular for another 300 years, the medieval romance. By the time Marie was writing her lais, France already had a deep-rooted tradition of the love-lyric, specifically in Provence. Marie's ''Lais'' represent, in many ways, a transitional genre between Provençal love lyrics from an earlier time and the romance tradition that developed these themes.<ref>Burgess, Glyn S., and Busby, Keith, 1986, p&nbsp;26.</ref>