Speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
Location: South School, Examination Schools
While the idea that Henry V made English a state language cannot survive close inspection, English became an established language of culture and (to some extent) a language of record in Britain in the fifteenth century. But francophone continuities persisted in culturally specific ways in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland alongside shifts in the relations between French and English. Some of these are seen in the pioneering teaching of French in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when manuals for French (first seen in thirteenth-century England) began to conceptualize French less as a language of England and more as an adjunct of external relations. French texts continued to circulate, and were printed in greater numbers than English-language works. English was a regional language throughout the Middle Ages and French and Latin remained important vectors of communication for Britain’s external relations well into the early modern period. The medieval history of Britain’s French helps challenge any sense of English as ‘naturally’ attaining its current prevalence.
French in Medieval Britain: Cultural Politics and Social History, c. 1100-c. 1500
Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
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.
