Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?

Marie de France is the earliest woman we know of in medieval European literature who wrote non-religious works. Her Lais have been very popular ever since their composition in the twelfth century. My book is the first one to have her full French text with an English translation; the aim is to make the Old French available to English readers for comparison, to give those learning Old French access to a translation to support their reading, and to give everyone access to the original manuscript. The version of the text on which the edition is based is fully digitized, so one could compare the Old French to the manuscript and get more of a sense of its original format and context. There's also an introduction (of course) and some appendices with related texts--for example, many of the lais involve animals in some central way, so there are texts about werewolves, hunting, and falconry at the end that provide cultural comparisons.

What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?

I translated some of the Lais for the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. People liked them, and asked about a full translation. I greatly enjoy translating and the Lais are wonderful to teach; it made sense to me that there should be a facing-page translation, and it's surprising that no one had done one yet, so I took it on.

If you could pair your book with one other text, what would you recommend? Why?

Maybe Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, which grew out of her translations of Charles Perrault's French fairy tales, or A. S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. All three are collections of short narratives in which a woman recasts traditional stories in an unapologetically feminist mode (taking the term "feminist" broadly, since it's not one that Marie would have known, of course). Hmm...now I'm thinking about a course I could teach….

The Lais of Marie de France came out in February from Broadview Press.