Esope au feminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalite (review)

Amer, Sahar. Esope au féminin: Marie de France et la politique de l’interculturalité. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999. Pp. 243.

Sahar Amer’s book on the cross-cultural dimensions of Marie de France’s Fables aims to revitalize our perception of a work that enjoyed widespread popularity in the Middle Ages, although it has remained largely undiscovered by contemporary readers outside the small field of medieval French and Anglo-Norman scholars. The originality and significance of Esope au féminin depend in large measure on the unusual gifts that Amer brings to her work. She exhibits not only the creativity and intelligence we expect in scholars trained by the best institutions in her field; her background, the unique range of cultural and linguistic tools at her disposal, in conjunction with her command of a variety of critical approaches, place her at the cutting edge of a number of intersecting fields and give her access to areas of knowledge, concepts and experience, where few scholars can follow. As the subtitle of her study indicates, this Esope enters into the multicultural dialogue that has grown strong in American communities both within and outside the academy, with all the polemical stresses any effort to open ears to the sound of new and different voices entails. Her choice to write in French represents a desire to extend that multicultural dialogue into the Francophone world, itself caught up in the exuberance and the tensions of intercultural exchange, with their inevitable political implications. In the wake of September 11 and in current debates on the “clash of civilizations,” the importance of exploring the history, and the present state of East-West confrontations, exchanges, and interdependence, has been underscored in the most urgent fashion.