"Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory presents the first exhaustive treatment of the rhetorical use of description and memory in all the narrative works of the late 12th-century poet, Marie de France - the first woman to compose literary texts in French. Through she had no access to treatises devoted solely to the arts of memory that were to develop in the centuries following her own, she nonetheless exemplifies some of the same techniques that are extolled by their authors." "Logan E. Whalen's study begins with a discussion of Marie's literary plan in light of classical rhetoric and the art of inventio, or literary topical invention, that developed in the Middle Ages. He then demonstrates how the fifty-six-line prologue that precedes Marie de France's Lais gives an outline of her literary plan, not only for the narrative texts that follow in that particular collection but also for the whole of her poetic corpus."--BOOK JACKET.