After more than eight centuries, the Lais of Marie de France still occupy scholars and enjoy a sizable reading public. Their longevity no doubt stems in large part from Marie's acute sensitivity to the dynamic of desire that lends shape, substance, and a degree of closure to each lai, yet also from a certain enigmatic quality that prevails throughout, awakening intense readerly curiosity without ever fully satisfying it. Also apparent is another predominant characteristic, thus far unexamined, one that fosters both the overall coherence of each lai, as well as a unique blend of limpidity and inscrutability characteristic of the collection as a whole: the privileged moments of specular encounter that bring sudden illumination concerning the self. We find at least one occurrence in each of the twelve lais attributed to Marie's authorship.

In this chapter, we shall see that, as it is consistently implemented in the Lais, the specular encounter ensures their perception as homogeneous tales that cohere as a collection. The Lais have received critical attention from two distinct perspectives. A majority of scholars have examined them individually or in subsets, and this substantial body of scholarship is laced with many rich veins. Indeed, the abundance of commentary and the diversity of interpretive positions with regard to any given text attest to the kind of active, hermeneutically constructive reception envisaged in the general prologue as constitutive of the perdurable longevity of the Lais among successive generations of readers.