This prose translation of twenty-four lays from the French Middle Ages brings to the general reader as well as to scholars a complement to the twelve well-known lays by Marie de France, the possible creator of the genre. These lays are mostly anonymous, and the majority, but by no means all of them, are, like Marie's lays, centred on a love interest of some kind in a variety of settings. But, unlike Marie's lays, their treatment varies from the courtly and sophisticated to the comic or the tragic, thereby illustrating the range of poems covered by the term lai in twelfth- and...

This prose translation of twenty-four lays from the French Middle Ages brings to the general reader as well as to scholars a complement to the twelve well-known lays by Marie de France, the possible creator of the genre. These lays are mostly anonymous, and the majority, but by no means all of them, are, like Marie's lays, centred on a love interest of some kind in a variety of settings. But, unlike Marie's lays, their treatment varies from the courtly and sophisticated to the comic or the tragic, thereby illustrating the range of poems covered by the term lai in twelfth- and...