The twelfth century was an age of humanism as well as feudalism. As often happens in times of comparative peace, a growth of interest in the individual was springing up and finding expression in lyric poetry and stories. The day of epics was waning. Those vast and involved poems, like to huge and complex frescoes, found little favour at a time when men and women, or at least women, had more leisure and inclination to try to get below the surface of things. Heroes had been glorified till they had almost become deified, and something more personal, more individual, was wanted. By the side of modern romance, where the most sacred and secret intricacies of human nature are, as it were, displayed under the microscope, Marie’s narrations may seem somewhat artless. But in putting into words the dawning desires of her time she gave form and impetus to feeling and thought struggling for expression, and gained for her work a definite place in the development of human utterance. Evolution, whether of the spirit or of matter, is the supreme law of things. Marie struck a spark from the ideal which poets and writers down the ages have fanned into a flame.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Marie thus refers to Count William:—
“Pur amur le cumte Willaume,
Le plus vaillant de cest royaume,
M’entremis de cest livre feire,
E de l’Angleiz en Roman treire.”
[12] Warnke. Die lais der Marie de France, p. lxiii.
[13] Marie de France, Seven of her Lays, trans. E. Rickert, 1901; Warnke, Die lais der Marie de France, Halle, 1885; Hertz, Spielmannsbuch, 1905.
[14] Compare with this the bed of “King Fisherman” described in Holy Grail, vol. i. p. 137, trans. Sebastian Evans, 1898.
[15] Hertz, op. cit. p. 396.
[16] This mention of Salerno is of interest on account of the reference to women practising there as medical experts. The origin of the School remains in obscurity, and it is not until the ninth century, when the names of certain Salerno physicians appear in the archives, that we get any definite information with regard to it. It seems to have been a purely secular institution, but it is quite possible that its development was aided by the Benedictines, who became established there in the seventh century, and who made medical science one of their principal studies. Before the middle of the eleventh century there were many women there who either practised medicine or acted as professors of the science, and some of the latter even combined surgery with medicine in their teaching and treatises. These women doctors were much sought after by the sick, and were much esteemed by their brother-professionals, who cited them as authorities. That the sexes were on an equal footing we infer from the fact that the title of “master” (Magister) was applied to men and women alike, the term “doctor” not having come into use, apparently, before the thirteenth century. Besides the general practitioners and the professors, there were others who fitted themselves specially for military service, as well as priests who added medical knowledge to their holy calling. The teaching followed that of Hippocrates and Galen, and the Salerno school was world-renowned in the art of drug preparation. In the thirteenth century, however, Arab medical writings began to be known in Europe through Latin translations, and Arab practice in medicine, though based on Greek teaching, initiated a new departure. As a result of this, the glory of Salerno waned. Another cause of its decline in fame and popularity was the founding by the Emperor Frederick the Second of a school of medicine at Naples, which he richly endowed, and the rise, unencumbered by old traditions—for medicine, like scholasticism, could be hampered by dialectical subtlety—of the school of Montpelier.
[17] M. Gaston Paris (Poésie du Moyen Age, vol. ii.), in recalling various legends of “Le Mari aux deux femmes,” suggests that the present story, borrowed by Marie from Celtic tradition, is probably of Occidental, and not Oriental, origin, since in the polygamous East the story of two wives would not have furnished a sufficient motive for a special narration.