 A contemporary of Marie, the English poet Denis Piramus, mentions in his "Life of Saint Edmund the King", written in around 1180, the lais of a Marie, which were popular in aristocratic circles.It is clear from her writing that Marie de France was highly educated and multilingual; this level of education was not available to the common or poor at this time, so we can infer that Marie de France was of noble birth, as other noble women such as Heloise and Christine de Pizan were also educated and wrote.In addition to secular wealthy women, a number of religious women of this period also used their education and pursued writing (Hrotsvitha, Héloïse, Bridget of Sweden, and Hildegard of Bingen, to name a few).