Equitan

 The poem, “Equitan”, written by Marie de France, brings up ideas about love, moderation, loyalty, and complexity that run through hierarchies in a court system. Equitan is a king that is described as the “lord of Nantes”, and enjoys pleasure and women above all. Marie describes Equitan to have a desire for sexual pleasure and does not necessarily fulfill his duties as the king in the process. 

    Equitan has a noble administrator called a Seneschal, someone who helps overlook the day-to-day activities that Equitan needs to partake in for the systematized court. Equitan’s Seneschal has a wife that is described as beautiful in the poem, and the fact that Equitan has not seen or met her has increasingly intensified the king’s desire for her. 

Marie brings up concepts like loyalty, love, and moderation in this part of the story. Marie addresses how Equitan ends up falsifying a sickness to confess his love to the Seneschal’s wife. This describes the moral of loyalty and moderation because Equitan (in this sense) is betraying his loyal administrator who overlooks many activities of the king.

In return, Equitan’s followers were getting concerned that he was not taking on a wife, all during the secret affair that was going on. Equitan decided to have the wife try and kill Seneschal in a scorching hot bath so that she can be Equitan’s wife. Marie brings up another recurring motif of the poem of Equitan’s irresistible lust for the Seneschal’s wife, where Equitan and the wife have intercourse in the bathroom, where the seneschal walks in.

I found the ending to this poem very interesting because Marie addresses symbolic themes of lust and love and how they can be detrimental to certain relationships and aspects of life. In this case, Equitan ended up taking his own life in a state of betrayal, and the wife ended up getting pushed in right afterwards by the Seneschal.