Ford Lectures 2025: Langue des reines: The Importance of Women to French and French to Women

Speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

The francophone education and patronage of British and European queens was significant throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and French was an important language both for them and for women from a wider range of class groups. This lecture looks at women’s  French-language writing and cultural patronage in the British medieval centuries and at some of the domains of discourse and activity where French increased medieval women’s access.   The literacies of women open new questions around personal and societal language acquisition and use.  

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.