Speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
Location: South School, Examination Schools
After looking briefly at the things William, Duke of Normandy did not do about French, English and other languages in Britain in his conquest, this lecture examines what happened on the ground linguistically. It argues for looser relations between language and identity than have often been presupposed in modern scholarship, and looks at some developments in the medieval writing of history and conquest in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. In considering how both written French and (more temporarily) empire became consolidated under the Angevins, it is important to develop analyses of cross-channel political and literary cultures that understands them as at once shared and open to local inflection.
French in Medieval Britain: Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500
French played a major, though not the only role, in the pervasive multilingualism of British history and culture. As Britain’s only medieval ‘global’ vernacular, it was also important to a wide range of people for their participation in external theatres of empire, trade, culture, conflict, and crusade. Displacing the long shadow of nineteenth-century nationalizing conceptions of language and their entrenchment in modern university disciplinary divisions, emerging histories of French in England and increasingly of French in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland offer new ways of understanding language and identity. These lectures trace francophone medieval Britain in a chronological sequence across its four main centuries, interpolating two thematic lectures on areas especially needing integration into our histories, medieval women and French in Britain, and French Bible translation in medieval England.
