SOURCE: "Text and Readers in Marie de France's Lais," in Romanic Review, Vol. LXXI, No. 3, May, 1980, pp. 244-64.

In the following essay, Sturges contends that readers of Marie's Lais are obliged by the structure of the Lais themselves to interpret the words and to become immersed in the stories as attempts at meaning, not as depictions of reality.

Although criticism in recent years of the Lais of Marie de France has done much to enhance the understanding of each of her individual tales, little attention has been devoted to the common themes and structures which unite them. Judith Rice Rothschild in her study Narrative Technique in the Lais of Marie de France [1974] has pointed out a number of themes reappearing in several tales; she believes that these common themes point toward an "artistic unity for the ensemble." To Rothschild's list of themes I would like to add the...