"Le dreit enfer vus mosterruns": Marie de France's Espurgatoire Seint Patriz

"'Le dreit enfer vus mosterruns'; Marie de France's Espurgatoire Seint Patriz." The Espurgatoire Seint Patriz, a translation of the Latin Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, is the latest and least-studied of the three texts attributed to Marie de France. It argues that the act of translation defines a purgatorial space in which the question of the veridity of the locale of the space and the authority of the otherworldly vision can be negotiated through the accustomed tropes of the vernacular journey narrative. There are three parts to the argument; that in the Espurgatoire as in her other writings, Marie was highly self-conscious about the mechanisms of translation and narration; that the changes she made to the Tractatus can be seen to form a cohesive meditation on the status of truth claims in vernacular narrative; and that this strategy suggests, through the trope of the "droit enfer," the submerged presence of a similar meditation within the Latin corpus as well.