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Summary Of Equitan By Marie De France

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Summary Of Equitan By Marie De France
Is there such a thing as a negative assemblage? In Marie de France’s Equitan, we see how the love affair between the king and his seneschal’s wife is wrong and will have terrible consequences for them in the end. Marie is clearly subverting the courtly love virtues of the time (like ones espoused in Guigemar for instance) in her cynical (rather than sincere or straightforward) presentation of the love affair.

In the courtly love tradition, love was not really love without pain and suffering. Truly loving someone could be described as fundamentally irrational, but necessary for the love to say alive. However, it is obvious that, in this story, their love is characterized by destructive tendencies. The affair literally destroys them—it is
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