Speaker: Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Fordham University)
Location: South School, Examination Schools
Recent scholarly work on the linguistic history of French in England, on French’s changing socio-cultural domains and increased participation in the administration of Britain, and on its widened ‘global’ reach in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries have combined to overturn older histories of Britain’s medieval French as rapidly ossifying into an artificial and moribund language. Under the Angevins and Plantagenets, French remained a language of conquest and trade within Britain and beyond it, offering meritocratic opportunities to a wider spectrum of social groups, many not initially elite. The Frenches to which francophone people from Britain now had access include the French of Outremer (the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, where French was a lingua franca for Europeans and Arabic speakers) and the Italo-French in which Marco Polo recorded his Eurasian experiences. One result of such expanded contact and awareness was a greatly increased French-language corpus of Latin-mediated natural science and encyclopaedic knowledge.
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.
