Graphies non-conventionnelles dans la correspondance privée au XVIe siècle

Abstract

AbstractThe Balcarres Papers in the National Library of Scotland contain a collection of several hundred letters (in French) addressed to Marie de Guise while she was Regent of Scotland between 1542 and 1560. Most of these are written in the formal epistolary French of the time, but three in particular, written by women in the Queen’s personal entourage, are written in more intimate style and, among other interesting linguistic features, embody spellings which stray some distance from current orthographical norms. It is widely assumed that non-standard forms such as these reflect the author’s lack of education and lower-class origins. While this explanation may hold for one of the letters presented here, it does not work with the other two: in the first of these, the writer seems to have deliberately chosen to use vernacular forms, perhaps on the grounds of current fashion in the Paris Court, while in the second she seems to have evolved her own personal spelling system reflecting her regional (Lorraine) identity. At all events, before the tyrannie de la grammaire, non-standard spelling was evidently not heavily stigmatised and might even have been prized in some social contexts.