MARGIVAL, NICOLE DE
(fl. late 13th or early 14th c.). Author of the Dit de la panthère d’amours, the earliest
known French poem that combines first-person narrative with a series of lyric insertions
composed by the narrator. In addition to citing several songs of Adam de la Halle, the
Roman de la Rose, and Drouart la Vache’s adaptation of Andreas Capellanus’s De
amore, Nicole includes his own corpus of forme fixe compositions. The Panthère, a rich
synthesis of Old French literary traditions—bestiary, lapidary, art of love, allegorical
dream vision, lyric forms—was an important influence on Guillaume de Machaut. Nicole
is also the author of a Dit des trois morts et des trois vifs, an often-used format for a poem
warning of the inevitability of death; and he may have composed an art of love, the Ordre
d’amours.
Sylvia Huot
Margival, Nicole de. Dit de la panthère d’amours, ed. Henry A. Todd. Paris: Didot, 1883.
Hoepffner, Ernest. “Les poésies lyriques du Dit de la panthère d’amours de Nicole de Margival.”
Romania 46(1920):204–30.
Boulton, Maureen B.M. The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–
- Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
MARGUERITE
(1202–1280). Countess of Flanders and Hainaut. Marguerite, sometimes known as
Marguerite of Constantinople, where her father Baudouin IX was emperor for a short
time, succeeded her sister Jeanne as countess in 1244. Her first marriage, to the Hainaut
nobleman Burchard d’Avesnes, was declared invalid by the pope, but her children from it
disputed her legacy with the children of her second marriage, to Guillaume de Dampierre,
a nobleman of Champagne. Civil war between them erupted in 1244, when she succeeded
as countess, and continued until 1257. Marguerite had inherited a substantial debt from
Jeanne and added substantially to it, creating antagonism by taxing and borrowing
heavily. In 1270, she demanded arrears on a money fief owed to the counts by the
English kings, which led to a commercial war won by the English. Marguerite and her
son and co-ruler, Gui de Dampierre, tried in 1275 to replace the government of Ghent,
which Ghent appealed to the Parlement de Paris as a violation of its charter. Marguerite
abdicated in favor of Gui on December 29, 1278. Her most notable accomplishment may
have been the abolition of serfdom in 1252 in all lands under the countess’s direct
control.
David M.Nicholas
[See also: AVESNES; DAMPIERRE; FLANDERS]
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