Anglo-Norman French Research Articles

Hebban olla vogala: An Eleventh-Century Link Between Dutch and English Literary History

The short eleventh-century lyric Hebban olla vogala is considered the earliest literary text in Dutch. Yet it only survives as a badly faded pen trial, written in England by a monk from the Low Countries. As a result, the exact reading of the text and even the language it was written in remain uncertain. Now, multispectral imaging of the manuscript has made it possible to provide an improved reconstruction of the text. An analysis of this new reading suggests that the scribe deliberately used the similarity between dialects of late Old English and Old Dutch to produce a rhyming verse text that was intelligible in both languages. As a multilingual and translingual poem, Hebban olla vogala must therefore be situated in English as well as Dutch literary history. The scribe’s other pen trials in the same manuscript demonstrate an interest in different Latin verse forms, indicating that Hebban olla vogala may also be a literary experiment. In exploiting the mutual intelligibility of Old Dutch and Old English, the poem points to an easily overlooked current of influence on late Old English and early Middle English literature. While this is hard to trace due to the similarities between the two languages, Dutch emerges as another potential influence, alongside Anglo-Norman French, on the development of rhyming verse in English after the Norman Conquest. In this way, Hebban olla vogala can be seen not only as a monument of Dutch literary history, but also as a testament to its interaction with English literature.

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's Mirour de l'Omme

Enfeoffment to Use, Legalism, and Humanism in Gower's <i>Mirour de l'Omme</i>

Émigrés: French Words That Turned English

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction.

Manuscripts of Nicholas Trevet’s Annales Sex Regum Anglie and Continuatio

Nicholas Trevet’s Annales sex regum Anglie and its anonymous Continuatio are important narrative sources for England in the high to late Middle Ages. Trevet (d. 1334 x 1339), a Dominican friar of England, was born in Somerset and spent much of his career in Oxford and London. He wrote a large number of texts, notably commentaries on biblical and classical texts.1 He also wrote histories, including the Historia for Creation–Nativity, the Chronicles for Creation–1334 (in Anglo-Norman French and later translated into Middle English), and the Annales sex regum Anglie for 1135–1307.2 It is the last of these that is under discussion here. The Annales, probably written between 1320 and 1323, covers a variety of subjects.3 Its prologue begins with ‘Atheniensium Romanorumque res gestas certissimus auctor Salustius ad inuicem conferens’, and its main text begins at Stephen’s accession with ‘Ut autem comodius iuxta nostram intencionem regum...

Using character N-grams to explorediachronic change in medieval English

AbstractThis paper applies character N-grams to the study of diachronic linguistic variation in a historical language. The period selected for this initial exploratory study is medieval English, a well-studied period of great linguistic variation and language contact, whereby the efficacy of computational techniques can be examined through comparison to the wealth of thorough scholarship on medieval linguistic variation. Frequency profiles of character N-gram features were generated for several epochs in the history of English and a measure of language distance was employed to quantify the similarity between English at different stages in its history. Through this a quantification of internal change in English was achieved. Furthermore similarity between English and other medieval languages across time was measured allowing for a measurement of the well-known period of contact between English and Anglo-Norman French. This methodology is compared to traditional lexicostatistical methods and shown to be able to derive the same patterns as those derived from expert-created feature lists (i.e. Swadesh lists). The use of character N-gram profiles proved to be a flexible and useful method to study diachronic variation, allowing for the highlighting of relevant features of change. This method may be a complement to traditional qualitative examinations.

The Middle English Creolization Hypothesis: Persistence, Implications, and Language Ideology

AbstractBailey and Maroldt (1977) and Domingue (1977) were the first to argue that language contact during the Middle Ages between Old English and both Old Norse and Norman French resulted in linguistic creolization. This theory, known as the Middle English creolization hypothesis, implies that Middle English, and perhaps Modern English as well, should be classified as a creole. Though frequently discredited on historic, linguistic, and terminological grounds, the creolization hypothesis has attracted interest for longer than might be expected. This paper argues that the persistence of the hypothesis may be ideologically motivated. The first section examines connotations of the term “creole” and applies these connotations to an analysis of the initial presentations of the creolization hypothesis. The second and third section of the paper review and analyze the forty-year history of the debate, focusing separately on arguments for creolization (and koinezation) between Anglo-Norman French and Old Norse, respectively. The fourth and final section examines challenges presented by the concept of creole exceptionalism to common attitudes about language equality and the theory of Universal Grammar. It is argued that these issues attract greater interest when contextualized within a discussion of a “major” world language such as English than when creolization is understood as an atypical process restricted to “peripheral” languages such as Haitian Creole. This paper also references relevant political issues such as the current controversy among medievalists about the field’s historic lack of inclusivity.

Some English Sailing Terms with Norse Antecedents: Weather side, luff, tack, beat to windward

Key terms in the English vocabulary of sailing to windward appear anomalous in dictionaries organized by mainstream English headwords. The Old Norse language, with Anglo-Norse and Anglo-Norman French as linguistic intermediaries, along with early medieval Scandinavian sailing technology are proposed as the source for this important word cluster. The tacking terms of ‘weather’, ‘beat’, ‘tack’ and ‘luff’ are provided with discrete etymologies vis-à-vis mainstream English vocabulary and seen in their historical context enrich our knowledge of the language of the sea through a more accurate identification of lexical sources.

Poetry by Marie de France

Reviewed by: Poetry by Marie de France Susan Brooks Marie de France, Poetry, trans. Dorothy Gilbert (New York: Norton Critical Editions 2015) xv + 407 pp. Marie de France was one of the most accomplished literary figures of the medieval age. Contemporaneous with Eleanor of Aquitaine, the poetess evinced the same inspired spirit expressed by the troubadours and trouvères of Eleanor’s Occitan and Norman courts. Marie’s identity is still undetermined, but she seems to have been connected to the retinue of Eleanor’s husband Henry II, the Plantagenet King of England and ruler of Normandy and Anjou. Refined and scholarly, Marie was multilingual, demonstrating a knowledge of Latin, French, and English as well as the Norman and Breton dialects, and was educated in classical literature, Christian discourse, and the folklore of France. That heady combination provided the raw material for Marie’s work, including her most sustained creative effort, her collection of Lais, Breton tales that she put into poetic form. A representative sampling of Marie’s poems have been gathered into a new volume by Dorothy Gilbert, a poet herself and also a writer, translator, retired professor of literature at numerous California universities, and secretary of the West Coast branch of PEN, the writers’ advocacy group. The anthology contains the Lais, a selection of Marie’s translations of Aesop’s Fables, and her version of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, based on a Latin text originally by the British monk Henry of Saltrey. Marie’s Lais are considered by many to be the best examples of her oeuvre. She transformed bardic fantasy recitals of common currency in Brittany into written poems of octosyllabic rhyming couplets, a French verse form common in the Middle Ages. There are twelve Lais in all, of varying length and subject [End Page 280] matter, but many of them involve love stories and elements of a numinous nature. They transmit many of the transcendent qualities of the courtly love ethos of Marie’s era, an elevation of romantic love to a spiritual code of conduct. Among the most famous of them are narratives of passion and intrigue such as “Equitan,” which tells of the betrayal of a knight via an unlawful liaison between his unfaithful wife and liege-lord and the dreamlike “Laustic,” where the song of a nightingale is a conduit for communications between a married lady and her chivalric lover. Another Lai, “Yonec,” also features a fantastic bird, in this instance a swan who is a knight under enchantment, with echoes of Zeus and Leda from antiquity. And in “Milun,” a second swan acts as an erotic emissary between another pair of lovers, separated and long-suffering. The most memorable of the Lais is probably “Bisclavret,” in which a loyal lord becomes a werewolf, and even in such a bizarre state continues to warrant fealty to his king due to an uncommon show of courtoisie. Also enjoyable is “Lanval,” wherein a knight of King Arthur’s court runs away to Avalon with the queen of the fairies. “Chevrefoil” is another Arthurian tale, with its references to Tristan and Isolde, and “Le Fresne” could be a plot from Shakespeare with its saga of mistaken identity between infant girls first separated at birth and then brought together again by mysterious workings of fate. The Lais are cumulatively magical in effect, in both their fabulous imagery and their flowing verse. Marie was a master storyteller and her treatment of these tales traces a line between classical works with mythological aspects such as Ovid’s Meta-morphoses, Celtic legends, longer romances like La Morte D’Arthur, and later French fairy tales such as Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella.” Of the one hundred and two of Aesop’s Fables that Marie translated from Middle English into Anglo-Norman French, Gilbert has chosen to include twenty-three of the more well-known ones as well as Marie’s own prologue and epilogue (with the latter incidentally providing the origin of the poetess’s pen name from her phrase “I am from France, I am called Marie.”) The Fables selected here number among them such familiar crowd-pleasers as “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse,” “The Cockerel and the...

Medieval dress and textiles in Britain: a multilingual sourcebook

Texts (with modern English translation) offering insights into the place of cloth and clothing in everyday life are presented here. Covering a wide range of genres, they include documents from the royal wardrobe accounts and petitions to king and Parliament, previously available only in manuscript form. The accounts detail royal expenditure on fabrics and garments, while the petitions demand the restoration of livery, for example, or protest about the need for winter clothing for children who are wards of the king. In addition, the volume includes extracts from wills, inventories and rolls of livery, sumptuary laws, moral and satirical works condemning contemporary fashions, an Old English epic, and English and French romances. The texts themselves are in Old and Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman French, with some of the documents switching between more than one of these languages. They are presented with introduction, glossary and detailed notes. Louise M. Sylvester is Reader in English Language at the University of Westminster; Mark Chambers is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University; Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester.

The Rise of English, the Decline of French: Supplications to the English Crown, c. 1420–1450

It is now some thirty years since the researches of John H. Fisher and Malcolm Richardson highlighted the importance of the records of the central government in the process of English-language “vernacularization” in early-fifteenth-century England. Their publication of the Anthology of Chancery English provided irrefutable evidence of a linguistic transition that overtook some key types of government records, which began to be drafted in English where previously they had been written in Anglo-Norman French and, to a lesser extent, Latin. But while the existence of these early examples of “official” written English cannot be doubted, the forces that underlay this linguistic shift are less clear. From the very outset, doubts were expressed about the hypothesis advanced by Fisher and Richardson, that the spread of English in the records of the central government could be directly attributed to a “language policy” put into place by the Lancastrian regime and, in particular, to the personal initiative of Henry...

WRITING WRONGS: THE DRAFTING OF SUPPLICATIONS TO THE CROWN IN LATER FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Petitions, bills, complaints, supplications -however one wishes to describe formal written requests to the English Crown from the king's subjects, this distinctive and ubiquitous type of prose writing has only recently been the subject of focused scholarly research.1 Much of the interest has focused on the content of supplications, and how this fits into broader political and administrative contexts; but increasingly attention has turned to the language of supplication and the place it holds in the Anglo-Norman and English-language writing cultures of the period.2 This discussion takes a different approach by focusing on the petitionary 'form': that is to say, the stylistic, lexical, and morphological conventions that generated stereotypical petitionary vocabulary and provided the basis for a universally applied linguistic structure or epistolary framework. My intention is to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding how petitions were written. It is not, it should be stressed, an enquiry about who wrote petitions. This is a question that eludes comprehensive treatment because petitions almost never displayed authorial markings, and indirect evidence for authorship is unfortunately extremely scarce.3 Nor is it my intention to investigate directly what language was used to write petitions, since until the fifteenth century there was little variation in the employment of Anglo-Norman French. Rather, the aim is to place petitionwriting into a broader epistolary context, to understand what influences helped fashion the petitionary form and to establish what levels of specialist knowledge and expertise were required for the conventions of supplicatory writing to be successfully implemented. Many of my conclusions will apply in broad terms to petitioning across the late medieval period, but I have necessarily drawn most examples from a narrower time-frame - the 13905 -when a sufficient number of different types of petition are available for comparison.The investigation divides into two parts. In the first, supplications are considered as a unified mode of writing and are compared with other documentary contexts. The intention is not to discover the origins of the petitionary form, by looking to twelfth- and thirteenth-century precedents,4 but to link petitions with other types of writing current in the late fourteenth century, and to suggest that they belonged to a broad and organically developing writing culture. In the second part an attempt is made to identify specific strands or types of petition-writing, by comparing the idiomatic forms of the supplications of the medieval chancery with those of parliament. By the late fourteenth centuty chancery had only recently emerged as a court in its own right, offering - alongside parliament and the council - a special form of jurisprudence that has come to be known, somewhat anachronistically, as 'equity'.5 Chancery was thus the newest of these institutions to develop petitionary procedures and it is only from the 13905 that original chancery bills survive in significant numbers. In this second section, I ask how far petitionary diplomatic transcended the contexts in which the petitions were presented. Was there a One size fits all* mode of petition/bill-writing, or were there stylistic and lexical differences that distinguished one type of supplication from another? This is a pertinent question to ask, not least because in modern scholarship a major difference is inferred by virtue of the fact that supplications presented in parliament are generally known as 'petitions', whereas those submitted in chancery are termed 'bills'.6 All this will provide the basis for a better understanding of the 'mechanics' of petition-writing in the fourteenth century. We may not be able to advance much beyond a general assumption that petitions were written by a mixture of clerks, scriveners, attorneys, and freelance scribes, but an in-depth exploration of how language was used to frame petitions promises at least to shed light on how the drafters of such documents plied their trade. …

Animal vocalization and human polyglossia in Walter of Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-century domestic treatise in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English

Walter of Bibbesworth’s late thirteenth-century versified treatise on French vocabulary relevant to the management of estates in Britain has the first extensive list of animal vocalizations in a European vernacular. Many of the Anglo-Norman French names for animals and their sounds are glossed in Middle English, inviting both diachronic and synchronic views of the capacity of these languages for onomatopoetic formation and reflection on the interest of these social and linguistic communities in zoosemiotics.

The History of Saint Edward the King. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 341; The French of England Translation Series, 1) by Matthew Paris, Thelma S. Fenster, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1137 neglect of the feminine expression of reciprocal desire in trouvere lyric.However, the resulting equality between desirer and desired that this exposes simultaneously manages tounravel her Lacanian methodology. Dell struggles tofit thisdiscrepancy into her overall argument, describing reciprocal desire as a bland, vanilla configu ration' (p. 99) that devalorizes the chanson cVami through lack of conflict, a theme which ostensibly now enters the discussion in order to provide an answer to the difficultquestion Dell has posed herself. It is inher study of the chronotopes' of desire?a termborrowed fromBakhtin? thatDell's line of enquiry becomes harder to follow. The last of the paired chapters explore masculine and feminine relations to space and time and how these affect and inform expressions of desire. Her analysis of the feminine-voiced poetry in cludes a lengthydiscussion of Freud's case studyDora, in an attempt to provide a comparison with the position of the female trouvere. In Chapter 6Dell's treatment of 'masculine space-times' inexplicably includes a scientific formula to calculate speed in the poetry (given as time divided by distance travelled), describing the male-voiced poet as one whose 'temporal versatility ismirrored in his spatial mo bility (emblematized by his horse)' (p. 148). The final chapter concludes thework by problematizing theplace of the feminine-voiced poet, asking, in thevein of Irigary, what subject position, ifany, she can possibly occupy. In an appendix to thework, entitled 'Afterthoughts',Dell admits the lack of a conclusive argument: T have found a kind of response tomy original questions, but it will probably always remain unsatisfactory'. Dell provides several novel and imaginative readings of trouvere lyric,but readers may find themselves lost in her overcomplicated methodology. Queen's University Belfast Mariana Neilly The History of Saint Edward theKing. By Matthew Paris. Trans, and ed. by Thelma S. Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne. (Medieval and Renais sance Texts and Studies, 341; The French of England Translation Series, 1) Tempe: Arizona Centre forMedieval and Renaissance Studies. 2008. xv+ 166 pp. ?21. ISBN 978-0-86698-389-1. This is a translation of a thirteenth-century hagiographical account of the life of King Edward theConfessor, littleknown tomodern scholars because it was written in 'the French of England', or Anglo-Norman French. It is the firstpublication in thenew French of England Translation Series (FRETS), which, as the series editors explain in their preface, has 'been conceived with the intention of enriching the available corpus ofwhat has been called medieval "English" literature' (pp. ix-x). The Estoire de seintAedward le reiwas composed in the late 1230s or early 1240s in octosyllabic verse, and was dedicated toEleanor of Provence, wife ofKing Henry III ofEngland. Although anonymous, scholars generally agree that it was composed by Matthew Paris, the famous chronicler of StAlbans Abbey. Itmay seem incredible thatMatthew Paris, whose criticisms ofHenry III and his regime are well known, should have composed a text for the queen?and by extension, forher husband? H38 Reviews which praises the royal couple. But on reading theEstoire the features ofMatthew's work familiar to all readers of his Chronica majora become clear: his strongmoral condemnations, the quick and final punishment dealt out to evildoers, his political views ('whoever does not do what his people want will never be granted power by them' (p. 68); 'you [ ] cannot undertake such a thingwithout the agreement of the community of the realm' (pp. 73-74)), and his lively, interesting style. Thelma S. Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne have made available to students and scholars, in an easily accessible form, a fascinating insight into Matthew Paris's work and talents,which reveals the famous political commentator working in his own mother tongue. A comparison of the translation with Kathryn Young Wallace's edition of 1983 indicates that they have not tried to produce a precise word-for word version, but have well conveyed the overall meaning and tone of thework. For those studying thework ofMatthew Paris, the religious interests ofHenry III and Eleanor of Provence, the cult of Edward theConfessor, constructions ofmale sanctity in the thirteenth century, or the changing legend of Harold Godwinson, this translation will be invaluable. The volume includes a detailed introduction and historical notes, aswell...

Women's books of hours in medieval England. Selected texts translated from Latin, Anglo-Norman French and middle English with introduction and interpretive essay. By Charity Scott-Stokes. (Library of Medieval Women.) Pp. xii+188 incl. frontispiece and 2 ills. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. £40. 1 84384 070 0; 1369 9652

Women's books of hours in medieval England. Selected texts translated from Latin, Anglo-Norman French and middle English with introduction and interpretive essay. By Charity Scott-Stokes. (Library of Medieval Women.) Pp. xii+188 incl. frontispiece and 2 ills. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. £40. 1 84384 070 0; 1369 9652

Anglo-Norman verse on New Ross and its founders

Literary evidence for political and social developments in medieval Ireland comes down to us in a variety of languages: Latin; a rich and — by European standards — early production in the Irish vernacular; Old Norse; Middle English; with sparser reference in Old English, Welsh and other nearby linguistic communities. Some of this evidence, tightly circumscribed in time, is also in Anglo-Norman French, and reflects a very different Ireland from that of Arthurian romance. These Anglo-Norman works, composed in Ireland or in Britain on the basis of eye-witness testimony, constitute a unique body of material, though their value as historical evidence is constricted in two ways: firstly, they are limited to three preserved texts; secondly, they are rigorously selective in their criteria of historiographical relevancy and in their treatment of the native Irish population, culture and political presence.

"Go West, Young Man!": A Vernacular Anglo-Norman Chronicle from Thirteenth-Century Ireland

The vernacular literary record of the Anglo-Norman invasion and settlement of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ireland is a sparse one. Leaving to one side the native annals and the more indirect reflection of these events as a stimulus to the compilation of the great codices such as the Book of Leinster and the Book of the Dun Cow, only two documents are extant in the French language. One, little marked by Anglo-Norman dialect features, is a poem from 1265 commemorating the completion of trench and bank fortifications at New Ross. The other, more substantial work is a chronicle of 3459 rhymed octosyllabic couplets in Anglo-Norman French, dated to 1225 or 1230: the single manuscript is incomplete at beginning and end.

Anglo-Norman French.

Anglo-Norman French.